BlogFest Winner!

Alright everyone – time to do our BlogFest wrap-up! First a huge thank you for everyone who has stopped by my blog and an extra thank you to my new followers. In fact, so many of you followed during BlogFest that I’ve reached 100 followers (yay!) and so will be doing a celebratory followers-only giveaway next week But first, what you’ve all been waiting for, the winner of the BlogFest giveaway… Congratulations to Eric T., proud new owner of a $10 Amazon Giftcard!

Beautiful Lies

Title: Beautiful Lies
Author: Clare Clark
Source: from publisher for a TLC Book Tour
Rating: ★★★★★
Review Summary: I loved this book: the mystery, the beautiful descriptions, the protagonist’s insightful thoughts about art, and  most of all the writing style which made me feel like this book could have been written in the early 1900′s.

In Victorian London, scandal can so easily ruin your life. And Mirabel and her husband have a very big secret to hide! Dealing with a creepy newpaper reporter’s sudden interest in Mirabel and her abandoned family’s sudden reappearance in her life, Mirabel is an awesome, independent, heroine who refuses to conform to societal norms. She’s also an artist, with an artist’s fascinating observations on life and the meaning of art.

Bloggiesta Begins!

In addition to the fun events of BlogFest, this weekend is also Bloggiesta! Here’s the host post describing the event, which includes a bunch of mini-challenges to get bloggers to interact while improving their blogs. Here’s my to-do list for the challenge:

 

• complete at least two mini-challenges in both the Organization and Time Management category, and in the Blogging Success and Improvement category
• update review indexes
• think about new header for blog and profile pic for twitter
• update blog roll
• think about future blog events for the holidays, book and movie releases, the election, etc.
• update About page
• work on pinterest, goodreads and twitter involvement
• participate in sunday twitter party

I think that’s plenty to keep me busy! I don’t know that I’ll get everything done, but it’s nice to have somewhere to start

Photography Friday

A squirrel, a flower, and a motorcycle? What do these three things have in common? They’re all pictures I took on the Cornell campus this week And while going to a new yoga class, I discovered we also have a waterfall right in the middle of campus. There’s definitely enough material on campus alone to keep me busy taking pictures every sunny day we have!

BlogFest Begins!

Hello all and welcome to BlogFest! For those of you unfamiliar with BlogFest, this is an exciting blog hop with a list of blogs all linking to each other and giveaways at every stop. Today I’ll be giving away a $10 Amazon gift card so be sure to enter the rafflecopter drawing :)

Have you entered? Great! Now it’s time to move on to the next participants:

Pages Off Life
Full Moon Bites
Lena Sledge’s Blog
Lille Punkin’
1099 Mom

The complete list of participants is here. Have fun hopping!

College Cooking

Title: College Cooking
Author: Megan & Jill Carle
Source: starting college gift
Rating: ★★★★☆
Review Summary: This cookbook has nice easy to follow directions, some tasty dinners, and my go-to, easy to make, dessert.