7 Quick Takes Friday (Vol 134)

1
This week I spent a large chunk of time trying to decide what books to order for our children’s St Nicholas day gifts.  Generally we focus on purchasing Faith books, at least for our younger ones.  After spending time at my two favourite blogs for book recommendations, via a discussion at 4Real I stumbled on bibliozealous’ ‘best’ list of Catholic picture books!  Thank you Ellie an awesome list.  Anyone like to suggest other book blog must reads?

2
During all this book selection I finally figured out how to create a wishlist at Book Depository:) Best of all I can create labels and categorise into groups.

3
Talking books thanks to Chareen’s ‘heads up‘ I’ve signed up to become a reviewer for Schoolhouse Review.  I’m sincerely hoping this won’t be an irritation to my readers, you’ll have to let me know if so, I think the secret is to balance reviews with regular posts. Thanks Chareen.

4
Books seem to be the theme this week;)  Be sure to pop back in over the weekend and I’m in the midst of reading and writing a book review, which I will share along with my FIRST BOOK GIVEAWAY!! Hint- This will arrive in your mailbox in time for Advent.


5
We’re counting down now to when Anna Maria will be home:)  Only three weeks till our girl will be here!!!  She hasn’t been home since Easter, it has been a long time:(

6
Last week I mentioned I was checking out blogs via the HSBA and was finding the first visual impression lasting.  So now I have some firm thoughts and I’m looking at my own blog with fresh eyes.  The header is vital, the first eye impact and it either draws you in or you click away.  I found I dismiss blogs with dark backgrounds, ideally white or very light for the blog post itself and for goodness sake don’t have cluttered backgrounds.  Talking clutter, sidebars that are too cluttered also had me instantly clicking away.   Are my sidebars too cluttered? I mentioned before too many ads deter me, and too many review posts in a row also were a killer (keeping this in mind for my own TOS)  As I as quickly scrolling if a blog’s last three posts didn’t contain something interesting I moved on.
So there you are, my own quick thoughts on how a random blog may draw you in, or not.

7
All the cleaning projects this week finally nearly ‘did me in’, I truly was gasping for air.  Great news though, is that the library is finally done!  Well still have a little to go but the floor can be walked on again.  Between the shipping container and our home library 18 boxes of books went to the book sale!  Finally I can turn my attention to wrestling the rest of the house into order, it didn’t help that we were gifted a van load of toys, however that pile is also now subdued and spread out amongst 4 families+.  Probably what really toppled me over was the pile of timber sitting on our dining room floor.  We’ve been cleaning and sawing timber in our dining room, which not only means I have to clamber of timber stacks to reach the school cupboard but it means the dining room furniture is squeezed into another room.  Anyhow there is light at the end of the tunnel, tomorrow we lay the timber in a couple of the bedrooms.

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