So I have been on a bit of a reading kick lately. Ricky keeps giving me a hard time about it, because I am on Goodreads and they have an annual reading challenge. Last year, my goal was 25 books, and I topped it by 1. This year, my goal is 30, and so far I am already 5 books ahead of schedule. The reason Ricky gives me a hard time is because every time I finish another one, I tell him how many I have read.

Like others I know, ever since reading the Hunger Games a few years ago, I have gotten into YA (young adult) dystopian fiction. You know… Divergent, etc. I actually read both the Hunger Games and Divergent long before any of the movies were released and loved them. Now it’s fun to see all of my friends reading them. There’s been a few more that I’ve read too. Here’s a list of the ones I can remember.

• The Hunger Games series
• The Divergent series
• The Maze Runner series
• The Razorland series
• Life As We Knew It (this one was ok, but since the rest of the series wasn’t about the same characters, I wasn’t too interested in reading them)
• The Legend series

The most recent and the one I’m going to talk about right now is the Legend series. I actually enjoyed these more than I thought I would. The best way to tell what is popular in YA novels is to head to a Barnes & Noble. When I worked there, I would see all the stuff being the most prominently displayed and get ideas for what to read. I need to visit a bookstore to do that again, as I’m running out of ideas!

The Legend series has similarities to the Hunger Games (and other dystopian novels, obviously). It takes place in the U.S., but it’s a U.S. that has been divided into the Republic and the Colonies. The main characters are Day, an outcast that has now become a criminal, and June, the nation’s prodigy. The books tell their stories, both how they got to where they are as well as how their paths end up crossing when June loses someone very close to her.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I really enjoyed these books. This series, as well as most of the other ones listed above, I could easily reread. And all of them are very hard to put down! It’s interesting reading about an imagined America that is broken and has some twisted ideas. The Legend series takes a look at both the Republic and the Colonies, both of which have become something very different from each other as well as very different from the America we see today. I’m not sure how authors like Marie Lu come up with their ideas, but they make for great fiction.

Something else to note is that in a lot of these series, they have very strong female main characters. The Legend series is no exception. June, in addition to being very smart (she got a perfect score in the Trials) is also a fighter and a soldier. As the story plays out, you get to see this more and more. It’s good to have role models like this in the books kids are reading. Is it weird that adults are reading them too? I don’t think so, since honestly, it’s just very entertaining fiction. All of these books are interesting and intelligent reading, in my opinion.

So if you got hooked on Hunger Games, definitely check out some more on the list above, particularly the Legend series. They’ll keep you busy in dystopian America for quite a while.

I’ve had enough people ask me about this that I thought I would write a blog about it. Lately I’ve been posting pictures of some of the meals that I make at home on Facebook and Instagram. Honestly, up until this year, I was not really much of a cook. I can follow a recipe ok, but usually because it’s easier I just buy something frozen or already made or I eat out or order pizza. But this year, I have been trying to eat better and also save some money. So I looked into what my options were.

Somehow I came across emeals. I happened to find a Groupon for them for $29 for a year’s worth of dinners. Basically, what emeals is, is a recipe service. I paid for a year with the $29 Groupon, and now each week (on Wednesday morning) they send me an email with a PDF attached that contains my recipes and shopping list for the week. The PDF has 7 dinner recipes, one for each day of the week. Each recipe usually contains an entree and a side and serves 2 people. And each recipe is always 500 calories or less for one serving. There are several different emeals plans to choose from, including paleo, Mediterranean, and plans for specific grocery store chains (i.e. if you shop at Fry’s or Safeway or Kroger, you know that everything on the list will be at that store). Since I am trying to lose weight, I chose the 500 calorie plan. I’ve not had any problem finding almost all of the ingredients at either Fry’s or Safeway.

The shopping list part of the PDF is also numbered so you know which ingredient on the list goes with each recipe, which makes it a lot easier to eliminate recipes that you decide not to make. I tried my first week to buy all the ingredients for all the recipes and just ended up with a lot of food. So now, I usually only buy ingredients to make 4 or 5 of the recipes each week, which saves money and helps keep from wasting food when you know it’s likely you might make other plans 1 or 2 days out of the week.

One of the best things about emeals is that they have an iPhone app. The app lists all 7 recipes (both for the current week and last week) and you can choose which ones to skip in the app. Once you skip them, they are no longer displayed and their ingredients are taken out of the shopping list. The shopping list on the app also allows you to easily check off ingredients as you buy them. I pretty much use the app all the time and never print out the PDFs at all. I do, however, save all of them and keep a spreadsheet with a list of the recipe names. That way at the end I will have a year’s worth of recipes, and if I want something specific I can just find it in the spreadsheet and see which PDF it is in.

When I first started using emeals, I would take a trip to the grocery store to buy what was on the shopping list. This became pretty time-consuming since it is pretty much a week’s worth of groceries and you get them from various areas of the store. And especially since sometimes I didn’t always know what an ingredient was (not a cook before, remember?) and/or didn’t know where to find it in the grocery store. This time-consuming shopping trip each week became a bit of a deterrent to using emeals. Between time for cooking and time for shopping, it was just taking too long. So I started to look into grocery delivery.

A friend of mine uses a service called FreshDirect, which I looked into but is not available where I live. So I checked to see what was, and came across Safeway’s delivery service. It’s possible there are better or cheaper grocery delivery services out there, I don’t know. But I have had pretty good luck with Safeway so far. After I get my new emeals menu each Wednesday, I go through and pick out which 4-5 meals I want to make that week. Then I use the shopping list on the app to search for and order all of the ingredients on Safeway’s website. Every now and then I find something I can’t get, but usually I am easily able to find all of the ingredients or something similar. Then I schedule my delivery for Friday during the day. It’s easy to do this because I work from home every Friday, so I know I will be there all day. Safeway sometimes emails out coupons for free delivery and/or free products which come packed with industrial machines specially made for this, check out rtgpkg.com to find more about this for your products, and still if you schedule a 4-hour window for them to deliver in (like 11a-3p on Friday for me), delivery is only $7. Not too shabby, IMO. Then, sometime in that window, your groceries are delivered to your door. This saves so much time for me since I usually go shopping by myself and have to carry a week’s worth of groceries up the stairs to our second floor apartment.

I’m a pretty big fan of this setup. I get my meal plan on Wednesday, order groceries on Wednesday or Thursday, and they are delivered on Friday. After that, I am all set and have all the ingredients I need to make any of the meals! Plus, I always know they will all be under 500 calories. Eating healthy has never been this easy.

This is really just a follow up to my last post. The day after I posted it, I was listening to this song, and it really seemed to reflect some of the thoughts I had while writing that last post. Just as a bit of a disclaimer, I really don’t necessarily feel “alone” all the time or anything, but I thought this song was a good echo of a general feeling or thought that I do have at times, one that I think a lot of people probably have. Check it out.

Everyone is walking on the edge of life
Like a ghost of a shadow, barely alive
Even time’s in a rush
But it’s going nowhere

Everyone’s connected but no one is connecting
The human element has long been missing
Tell me, have you seen it?
Have you seen it?

Or are we alone?
‘Cause I need something to believe in
Tell me, are we alone?
Where is the life? Where is the feeling?
Is anybody out there?
Is anyone listening?
Is anyone left in this whole world?
Or are we alone?
Alone…

Where is the feeling?

Everybody needs to know
Somebody who cares.
Just a friendly face
You can trust to be there.
Are you afraid to be known
And not be a stranger?

‘Cause everyone’s connected but no one is connecting
The human element has long been missing
Tell me, have you seen it?
Have you seen it?

Or are we alone?
‘Cause I need something to believe in
Tell me, are we alone?
Where is the life? Where is the feeling?
Is anybody out there?
Is anyone listening?
Is anyone left in this whole world?
Or are we alone?
Alone…

Is anyone left in this whole world?
Or are we alone?
Alone…