My Bathroom Smells Like Pie

Saturday 5:30AM I received a notification from my bank that someone tried to use my credit card at a TikTok store. Fucking TikTok! They have stores there? Just one more reason to hate them. Anyway, my bank was rightfully suspicious, declined the charge, and canceled my card. I'm glad they're on high alert, but now I have to be inconvenienced by waiting for a new card and changing my automated transactions when it gets here. Paying cash in the meantime. Hate scammers. Hate them so much.

Anyway. As I mentioned, I went to Mother's again, this time with my friend J, and had another delightful lunch. I try not to order the same thing every time, so Saturday I had the ancient grains bowl, which was very tasty. Lemon quinoa, broccoli, mushrooms, etc. I'm glad I didn't dump the sauce all over it because it was pretty spicy, and a tiny dab per bite was plenty. We browsed the store afterwards, and I couldn't resist a bar of pumpkin pie soap with a cute little soap dish. Not to use! Then it would be all gone. I put it in my bathroom for the scrumptious scent, so now my bathroom smells like pie.

Today I met my book club group at The Habit in Seal Beach. First time I've tried that place, but I wasn't in the mood for a burger, so I ordered a chicken Caesar salad. It was good. We had a great discussion about this month's book ~ Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica. Most of the group liked the book more than I did, but we all agreed that the narrative was choppy and hard to follow, there were too many red herrings, the police procedural stuff made no sense, and the ending sucked. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln...

After starting and stopping a bunch of crappy movies, I stumbled onto a fabulous one Friday night. It was Red Dragon (2002) on Netflix, the prequel to Silence of the Lambs, and in my opinion it was just a tad better (even though I love Jodie Foster). I read the book ages ago, in the 1980s, a gift from my friend K, and this is one of the rare cases where the movie was just as good. It helped that there was a stellar cast (Edward Norton, Anthony Hopkins, Ralph Fiennes, et al). Gruesome story, but if you can handle that, I highly recommend the film.

Similarly, after several literary disappointments, I began You by Caroline Kepnes on Saturday morning and finished it by Sunday night. It's so good! The narrative is straight up present tense, told in a single, linear point of view, and it is utterly compelling. See? When you have a solid story with an interesting protagonist, you don't need a bunch of gimmicky chronological flips and teasers. You can just lay it out there. That's not to say I hate all flashbacks ~ I don't ~ but they have to be good. Most aren't, especially the ones that careen back and forth in time with multiple viewpoints. I mentioned I was reading You to my book club, and they informed me that it is a series on Netflix, and naturally I started watching it tonight. So far, so good! Differs a bit from the book, but in ways that make the main character more well-rounded, so yay.

Since I gave up coffee, my blood pressure has been consistently in the "green zone," which makes me happy. I still have caffeine, via a few cups of black tea per day (not after 3PM though), which doesn't seem to affect my BP negatively. I didn't have any diet soda this weekend, but I will during the work week because I am not a saint. LOL