What I'm Playing
Sadly, I haven't had the time or energy to play any fun new games this month, what with baby coming in a week (!) and several bouts of horrible stomach viruses making their rounds it the family, but I have been playing some games with my boys. Jack is 7 and James is 5, and thankfully we have moved beyond Candy Land and into some actually fun games!
Hiss
This is a simple tile-laying and color matching game but surprisingly fun and satisfying. Each player takes turns laying down colored segments of snakes, trying to make the longest snake that has a head, tail, and as many matching colored middle pieces as you can draw in a row.
It's great for younger players because you don't have to be able to read, and it goes very quick. A patient 3 year old who can match colors could easily play, but my 7 year old Jack still loves it too.
What I'm Reading
Wheel of Time Book 9: Winter's Heart
I didn't have high hopes for this book after how book 8 dragged on, but it actually went pretty quick. The new city with interesting rules, finally finding out (and acting on!!!) long-laid plans, and characters reuniting and taking action together after being apart for a long while. (Even if those actions were sometimes cringe-worthy.) There was even a kidnapping! I was STILL annoyed with how deep the descriptions are of all the random characters who don't matter and we will never see again are...my eyes kind of glaze over and I speed read through those paragraphs, but I accept that it is just a part of Robert Jordan's writing style. And the climax was exciting!Wheel of Time Book 10: Crossroads of Twilight
Wow, this one was bad. So slow. Agonizingly slow. Nothing happened except that the Aes Sedai (and Elayne) were absolutely, horrendously insufferable. I rolled my eyes so much I thought that they might fall out of my head. Of all the female characters in the entire series, there are only two that I can even barely tolerate, and the rest I just want to slap. Something very exciting happened at the end of the previous book, and yet no one is really reacting to it in an exciting way AT ALL. In fact, most of this book happens simultaneously with the last SINGLE chapter of the previous book. If the ending of this series doesn't just blow me away, I honestly couldn't recommend it to anyone.Robert Jordan has TONS of powerful, independent female characters...and they all seem to hate each other. They are incapable of compromise, humility, or working together for more than two minutes. It gets really frustrating!
Wheel of Time Book 11: Knife of Dreams
I'm almost done with this one, and though a few exciting events happen, and it FEELS like the ending is coming soon, it's still slow going. Not as slow as Book 10, thank goodness, but not as exciting as the first several books. In the last half things pick up a little bit, and in the final few chapters, as usual, we get some really exciting action that resolves three main plots that have been dangling for the past three books!Sadly, this was the last book that author Robert Jordan was able to complete before his death in 2007. The last three books in this series were written (using Jordan's outlines and notes) by Brandon Sanderson. I'm a big fan of Sanderson and though it is sad that Jordan passed before finishing Wheel of Time, I'm looking forward to reading Sanderson's take on the end of the series...and hoping for fewer descriptions of random people we only meet once, haha.
What I'm Watching
Game of Thrones
Who isn't watching Game of Thrones??? I read the series (twice) way back before season 1 even aired, when I was pregnant with Jack. It was so long ago that the copy of the book I got from the library said "First in a Trilogy!" on the cover. When I got to the end of the first book I thought, "That was so gross and bloody and horrible and I can't believe what happened...better get the next one ASAP!" It was like a train wreck that I couldn't look away from, and soon I'd read all of the books that had been released and was very sad to find out that it was barely even half written.So while it has surely been frustrating waiting for the last of the books to be published, watching this last season has been really fun! We even hosted a dinner party for the season premiere using recipes from the Inn at the Crossroads recipe book. We (meaning Gunnar, of course) have actually cooked our way through the majority of the recipes in the book and eat several of the dishes on a regular basis. The apple salad is a particular favorite of mine!
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