Being a short month February has ended already!
What I have read
I have been reading like mad this month which is great for my reading goal, but as I have been devouring a series I have read before (a good ten years ago, so I barely remember a thing about it which is great) it’s not so great for my new-to-rereads ratio.
What I have read:
- One Last Stop – Casey McQuiston
- Better than Fiction – Alexa Martin
- The Bookshop Sisters – Alice Hoffman
- The Nightingale Girls (Nightingales #1) – Donna Douglas
- The Nightingale Sisters (Nightingales #2) – Donna Douglas
- The Nightingale Nurses (Nightingales #3) – Donna Douglas
- The Edinburgh Skating Club – Michelle Sloan
- An Argumentation of Historians (St Mary’s #9) – Jodi Taylor
- Nightingales on Call (Nightingales #4) – Donna Douglas
- Five Have Plenty of Character – Vanessa Tobin (reviewed here)
- A Nightingale Christmas Wish (Nightingales #5) – Donna Douglas
- Enid Blyton’s Holiday Stories
- Hope for the Best (St Mary’s #10) – Jodi Taylor
- Nightingales at War (Nightingales #6) – Donna Douglas
- Nightingales Under the Mistletoe (Nightingales #7) – Donna Douglas
And I’m still working on:
- Parnassus on Wheels (Parnassus #1) – Christopher Morley
- The Death of Captain America – Larry Hama
- Plan for the Worst (St Mary’s #11) – Jodi Taylor
- Practice Makes Perfect (Larkford #2) – Penny Parkes
- Five Are Together Again – part one of my review
Five Get Together Again
What I have watched
- I’ve carried on with Richard Osman’s House of Games, Only Connect, and George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces and Call the Midwife which has sadly just ended, and there’ll be no more until Christmas!
- I finished Smack the Pony and so my new show is The Good Witch. It turns out that it follows on from a bunch of TV movies but it is the start of a new story arc so it’s not essential to have watched the movies. I picked it because I like witches and also James Denton, but I’ve only watched a few episodes because most nights I am picking up a book instead of switching the TV on. I squeezed in the new season of Dream House Makeover, though, but they are short episodes and a short season!
- We have been watching iZombie at weekends, which while no Buffy, is still fun, plus The Lost Boys.
- Tuesday nights films were John Tucker Must Die (a new one for me) and 10 Things I Hate About You which I have seen before but could only recall about one scene. We had intended to watch the ‘seminal’ 90s version Little Women but it’s not on any of the streaming services we have. Plus She’s All That which I had watched just a few months ago but my sister wanted to revisit anyway.
- Brodie and I watched Ice Age 2 together, and the hilarity at the poor squirrel continued.
What I have done
- My mum gave me a big pile of jigsaws to donate to the library but of course I had to do them first, so my first was the vintage toy shop one.
- Have been very busy at work organising and promoting Cyber Scotland week and also a 3D printing session I’m running for British Science Week. I also had my first experience of taking apart one section of the 3D printer to clear a massive blob of hardened plastic – only burnt one finger tip slightly so I think I can still count it as a success.
- We went to Dundee Comic Con so Brodie could meet his heroes and make slime, and visited the Botanic Gardens and the St Andrews Aquarium for the first time in a while.
- We discovered a very unafraid fox in our back garden one evening, but we haven’t seen it back again. Something has been eating the dog snacks we’ve been leaving out but it could be anything!
- We also went up to Carnoustie to do their Book Trail, some of the shops had really gone all-out in decorating their windows for it.
- Built the Lego Eldorado Fortress that I’ve had for more than ten years but never put together. It took me more than twice as long to find all 500 odd pieces amongst the ton of Lego I have than it did to actually build it. And then Brodie immediately commandeered it for his Lego Avengers to play in.
Fiona
pippastef
worldofblyton
World of Blyton 
During the first pandemic summer 2020 we watched 9 foxes between May and September and took photos of one of them while he was watching our white German shepherd Cody.
February 2023 was the most horrific month for my husband and me as our Cody had to be put down 2 weeks ago. He had cancer. My advice for every dog owner: if your dog limps for more than a week, have his leg x-rayed even if his vet assumes it’s only arthritis. That might save his life and the cancer still could get treated successfully. Our vet thought it was creaky knees and gave him a joint supplement on 13th of December after 2 weeks of limping. She claimed she could only x-ray Cody while he was anesthetized which is not true.
Finally on the 20th of January a dog orthopedist x-rayed our dog without anesthesia and the cancer in his right front leg was already inside the bone.
On the first of February we had Cody anesthetized and the dog oncologist did an MRI, ultrasound and another blood platelet count. At that point the cancer had already reached liver and kidneys, even amputation could not have saved him. So if I learned one thing from his vet’s misdiagnosis: x-ray the dog after one week of limping.
We were with Cody until he died at the vet. It broke our hearts.
On Sunday we finally put an obituary on our Facebook pages.
Of course I did not read much in February while this was going on (to make matters worse, we had a water pipe burst upstairs on the 4th of February and the crack in the ceiling is still not fixed).
I’ve read “Stillwatch” by Mary Higgins Clark (7th time since 1986), because it’s one of my all-time favorite crime novels and because it takes place in Washington, D. C., where we’ll spend a week in early April to see the cherry blossoms.
Now I’m reading another D. C. crime novel by Dan Brown, “The Lost Symbol”.
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