2025 – In The Books!

2025 was a good year in so many ways. I picked up lots of new subscribers (thank you!) and discovered so many interesting new blogs and blogger friends. I love these glimpses into your lives 🙂

This summer I embarked on a journey to a (mostly) sugar free lifestyle. I was pleasantly surprised this morning to discover I have lost 15.8 pounds! In the new year I want to incorporate more healthy choices, but eliminating sugar was a good place to start.

I read 56 books, falling just short of my Goodreads goal of 60. I will set my Reading Challenge goal at 60 again in the new year. I currently have 40 books on my bookshelf and 20 on my Kindle app. I hope to get through most of them, though let’s be honest, the year will end and I will still have sixty books or more in my TBR pile. I can’t help it, I’m a book junkie, lol.

I also read 11 books of the Old Testament, which I’ve been working through one chapter at a time.

On the writing front, I had two books release in 2025, Superheroes and Chester’s Miracle. I’m thrilled with the reviews they are getting. I’m on track to finish my current WIP, Blackberry Summer in the next few months (I hope 🙂 )

After much thought and prayer, I’m planning a life change in the new year. I’m retiring! I have been working for 44 years (unless you count the paper route I had when I was twelve, and the years I dusted furniture in my mom and dad’s furniture store ) Truthfully, this girl is tired. At 18 I walked into Burger King and began life in the working world. Oh, the places I’ve clocked into since then!

I’ve been a pizza maker. A mail sorter. A hairdresser. A nurse’s aide. A factory worker. For a few lovely years, I worked alongside my mother in our wallpaper shop. For even more years I was a teaching assistant. I have sold tickets and scooped popcorn in movie theaters, baked bread and fried doughnuts in bakeries. And always, in the background, I have been a writer.

Time is so precious. The older I get, the more I understand this. My plan is to still work one or two days a week. It will provide a little extra money and keep me from becoming a recluse 🙂 But I can no longer watch precious time slip away as I stand behind a cash register day after day. I want to spend my time on people. On hobbies. On my writing. And on whatever work the Lord gives me to do with the time that I have left 🙂