Another year coming to a close! I am so grateful to all my readers. Thanks for reading and sharing, and for your comments and emails. Cheers to health, happiness, and prosperity in 2025! Wishing you and yours a safe, healthy, and joyful New Year filled with great books!
I was so thrilled to have my family coming home for Thanksgiving, but you know what they say about best laid plans? I understand how difficult it is to juggle the holidays when my son and his family live in New York, we live in Florida, and my daughter-in-law’s family lives in Chicago. It’s impossible to be in so many places at once! The onus seems to be on my son and his family to make all the grandparents happy, and they are incredibly thoughtful about it. They were all set to come to Florida for Thanksgiving but my husband and daughter came down with Covid! My granddaughter is only seven months old, and just got her first Covid vaccine. It just seemed too risky to visit right now. Luckily, they were able to get a credit for their airfare, and we hope to see them soon.
Book News
50 notable works of fiction from 2024
Highlights among the year’s novels, short-story collections and works in translation, as selected by the staff of The Washington Post’s Book World.
The 10 best books of 2024 (The Washington Post)
Best Books of 2024 (Goodreads)i
Best Books of 2024 (Book Riot)
Best 20 Books of 2024 (Publishers Weekly)
Best Books of the Year (Barnes & Noble)
Best Books of 2024 (Kirkus Reviews)
100 Notable Books of 2024 (New York Times Book Review)
Food News
Why are bananas berries but strawberries aren’t?
A strawberry isn’t a berry. But scientifically speaking a banana is a berry. So what’s the deal? Why are berries so hard to define?
The Feast of the Seven Fishes
I love the idea of this, but with just three of us having Christmas Eve dinner, I rarely make it to 7. I usually make Baked Clams Oreganata, Caesar Salad (with anchovies!), and Seafood Risotto with shrimp, mussels, lobster, and scallops. Close enough – how much can three people eat!
Other News
My husband retired this year. Well, he was laid off from a job he had for twenty years where he survived numerous layoffs over many years. The timing wasn’t bad – he was planning on retiring in another year or so, and this just accelerated the timeline. I am not quite there yet – I hope to work for at least another year.
We are planning on retiring to Portugal where the cost of living is so much lower, health care is more affordable, and gun deaths are a rarity, not a way of life. My husband and I visited last April and loved it. Last month, my husband and daughter visited, and she loved it. We may be retiring, but our daughter lives at home and will come with us so it was very important that she be happy about the move as well.
It is a time-consuming and somewhat expensive process to move to another country, but we are excited about the prospect of what will surely be our last big adventure. Once I retire, the plan is to move to a less expensive state for about a year while we work through the immigration process to Portugal. Florida has gotten insanely expensive – if we hadn’t bought our house when we did 38 years ago, and paid off our mortgage, we wouldn’t be able to afford to live here. The cost of insurance – homeowners and auto – is crazy expensive, like another mortgage payment. If I had to do that on top of an actual mortgage payment, we’d both be working two jobs to afford it.
We are thinking about moving to Delaware or New Hampshire, two states with lower costs of living, no state income tax, and a tiny bit closer to my kids in New York. If I could afford to live in NY, that would be ideal, but it is prohibitively expensive. I haven’t lived in winter since I was a kid. One of my closest friends lives in Maine, and I have never even been there! It would be nice to be able to see her more often, and NH would allow for that. On the other hand, a New Hampshire winter is a bit scary for me! Delaware has slightly milder and shorter winters than NH.
Honestly, I’d love to move to Orlando for a year. Our South Florida friends would be able to visit. The housing costs are lower there, but insurance is still a nightmare. I love Disneyworld, and if we lived there, we could get annual passes. I always thought that would be my ideal place to retire. It’s a long shot though. Any thoughts on where to retire? Please share!
As always, thanks for reading, and stay safe.
Thanks to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal for allowing me to “gift” my readers with free access to these articles, a lovely perk for subscribers.
Stacy Alesi's BookBitch.com™ 