Hello Dear Readers….if I have any left after 2 years? Yes, it’s been that long since I posted – April 2023. So much has happened since then, which I will leave for another post, but I just wanted to reblog a book review I wrote in the summer of 2022, Miss Austen – by Gil Hornby. Masterpiece Theatre will be showing a 4 part mini-series adaptation of the book starting on Sunday May 4, at 8/9pm on your local PBS station. It aired previously this year in England on the BBC.
Here is the link to my previous blog:
Here’s a short description and the trailer for the series. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/shows/miss-austen/
Just before I stopped posting, WordPress had changed to the new block editor, so it may take me awhile to navigate here and learn all the changes since then, and banish that evil AI from my WordPress kingdom. Plus I bought a new laptop this week, also a learning curve, so please forgive me if you leave a comment, and I don’t reply right away. I promise it won’t be two years! Joni PS. There that wasn’t so bad. I may be rusty at this blogging business, but it seems I still know how to write a long run-on sentence!
thehomeplaceweb 
Let me be the first to say “Welcome Back Joni!” I laughed about you knowing how to write a long run-on sentence. I am good at those too. 🙂 I plan to watch this series and got a trailer for it as I subscribe to Masterpiece for “All Creatures Great and Small”. I hope to read the book one day. I am going to read your prior post to refresh my mind as to characters, etc. on Sunday. I hope you are not overwhelmed by all the newfangled stuff on here.
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Thanks Linda! I enjoyed the book as I’m a Jane Austen fan, but the mini-series should give you a good introduction to it. I’m not sure about the casting from watching the trailer, as that can be key in any movie about Jane. I read that both Netflix and the BBC are filming new adaptations of Pride and Prejudice next year – but how many more versions do we need? It seems like every 10 or 20 years they do another one. No one will ever top Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy, (1995) although I preferred Keira Knightley as Elizabeth. (2005) They usually get either one of them wrong, or sometimes both!
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I remembered that you were a Jane Austen fan Joni. Unbelievably, I have gotten this far in my life without reading “Pride and Prejudice” either. My high school, even college (where I minored in Literature), never focused on the classics unfortunately. I had books that I had to read two or three times, among them “Beowulf” which I never understood, even with Cliff’s Notes. I am planning to watch the miniseries live, as you know, since I don’t have cable, nor a modern TV.
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Linda, I didn’t even know what Beowulf is? I had to google it. Sounds dreadful. I never even liked Shakespeare, although I just finished reading Jodi Picoult’s latest By Any Other Name, historical fiction which deals with whether Shakespeare was really a woman. Not the best writing but the theory was fascinating. I watched an author interview with her. It does seem rather impossible that Shakespeare was a full time actor yet he wrote 38 plays, but left not so much as a book or a revision or any evidence of writing on his death, had zero music background and never even left the country, despite 12 of the plays being set in Italy or Denmark or other places etc I may blog about this sometime.
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Joni, I absolutely despised Beowulf and you are lucky you never heard of it until you read this comment. It was in Olde English and even with the CliffNotes I had no idea what it was about to be honest. I had Shakespeare required reading as well and didn’t really care for that either. When I graduated I said “I’ll never read a book I don’t understand and/or enjoy again.” Why did we never read the classics, like “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Catcher in the Rye” and when I watched the movie “The Whale” I thought that I am probably the only person who never read THAT book. I read some books on my own, like “To Kill a Mockingbird” but I once looked at the list of the 100 Best Books of All Time and I had not read many of them. Years ago I told myself “when you’re retired, you’re going to the library and get these books and read them” … that was before blogging, but some of those books are likely available on Project Gutenberg for free so there is no excuse for not reading them, when they are just a mouse click away. You should blog about that topic – everyone enjoyed your book reviews.
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Welcome back to the wilds of WP territory!
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Thank you for the Welcome! I hope to get caught up on Reader some time in the next century!
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Yes, I’m still here! I’m happy to see you back. That’s the problem with blogging – when a favorite blog goes dark, we are all left to wonder what happened.
I have taken up a serious audiobook habit since you last posted, and your periodic book reviews inspired me to report on my own kind-of-reading. One of the lists I am going through is a collection of classics on a shelf at home, so P&P will get its turn with me at some point.
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Hi JP! Thanks for the welcome back! I did miss your posts too. I haven’t even been on Reader yet, and it may take some time to get caught up with everyone’s lives. I heard you had retired and had a new job. Linda has been encouraging me for awhile to start posting again and keeping me up to date on all the WordPress changes. I hope AI is something you can turn off. I haven’t tried importing media yet. Everything looks so different here, plus I am coping with a brand new laptop and Windows 11.
I know it was bad of me not to let people know, but I just didn’t have the energy to write, period, and nothing good to write about. I’ve had an eventful 2 years (open heart surgery in 2023 to fix a leaky valve, my mothers crisis placement in a nursing home, I had been caring for her at home, a long recovery period with postop complications. Then her illness last spring, she passed away in August at the age of 98, so I’ve spent the past 9 months cleaning out and selling her house and settling the estate. I remember you posting about your mother being in the nursing home – those are not places anyone would want to be as they are government run here and so short staffed. So it’s been a rough few years, but I hope to get back on here, at least occasionally.
I never got into audiobooks but I read a ton of books after my surgery – maybe 50-60 books over the winter, 3 or 4 a week, as that was the only thing I could do. I had no desire to watch tv or movies. I’ve also started going to library book club again, after an absence of 5 years. Now that would be something to blog about. I’m not sure what to think about that group, or if I’ll even persist. There is one guy in the group, but I think he feels outnumbered. I would be interested in your opinion on P&P after you have read it.
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I am so sorry to hear about your mother, she always sounded like quite a remarkable lady. And I hope your recovery has gone well.
Yes, I retired from law and did something that many would consider crazy – I took a 5 week schooling program to get a commercial driver’s license and am now driving a tractor-trailer. This is why the audiobook format works so well for me.
I wouldn’t worry too much about catching up on blog posts you missed, that could be daunting!
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Yes she was a remarkable person. I now have 300 paintings in my house which I’m unsure what to do with, but I know I would like to show her latest exbibit, which was aborted during the pandemic, someplace else.
That’s quite a change in profession! I expected you to maybe do something with vintage cars!
I’m fully recovered now, saw my cardiologist in April and he didn’t even order any tests, told me to come back in a year. The thing with my kind of surgery is it was mainly preventive, so I’m lucky that way. I may post about it at some point, as if I had known anyone who had gone through it, other than by-pass people, then it might have helped me prepare. I might also post about my Lord of The Flies bookclub! See the creative ideas are coming…..and they were absent for a long time.
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Welcome back!
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Thanks Dorothy! I won’t be able to get caught up on Reader for awhile, just taking it slow for now.
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It’s all good!
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It’s nice to see you back. Hopefully, you’ve been ok and just got bored with us, and that’s why you took a break. LOL
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Thank you for the welcome. I didn’t know if anyone would remember me after that long. No I wasn’t bored with blogging, but let’s just say the past two years have been eventful (open heart surgery with complications, my mother’s illness and passing, cleaning up her house and estate etc.), but I survived it and hope to return to writing here, if I can master all these WordPress changes!
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Oh now, you have had a lot going on! It sounds like you a better, that’s good. 🙏 And it does take some energy to write every week. I’m sorry to hear about your mother. What have you done with all of her artwork? It seemed like she had a mini-museum going on. WITH WP and BLOCK EDITOR… I was forced to use it a few years ago, I hated it, now have gotten used to it, I still think the simple Classic Editor was the best. 💕
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Yes, I’m better now. I got a clean bill of health from my cardiologist in April, just an annual checkup now. On minimal meds too. I have probably 200 paintings here in my house – the better ones from her 4 exhibits are upstairs in boxes in my four closets, and the spare bedroom, the rest are down in the basement and need to be sorted some day. I’m not sure what to do with them all yet, but I would like to show her last exhibit someplace else. It got aborted due to the pandemic. Emotionally I haven’t been able to deal with it yet. I didn’t find WP too bad when composing my short blog, but I haven’t tried to deal with Media photos yet. It came back to me fairly quickly.
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When you are up to it, that will be a nice project. Her paintings are lovely, so cheerful. Everyone will enjoy seeing them when you have them displayed. That will lift your spirits.
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Welcome back Joni! FYI I am still using classic editor.
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Thanks Diane! I’m using the block, and it did come back to me easily enough, but I haven’t imported any photos yet, and so many things seem in different places. I’m sure I’ll get used to it though.
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Hello Joni! I am delighted that you have returned, for I have missed hearing from you! We have been away for a while, so I am catching up on reading missed posts. For the record, I still use the classic editor 🙂
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Hi Anne! Nice to hear from you too! I hope to get back in the swing of things shortly, but am trying to get used to a new laptop with Windows 11 this week, plus all the changes here, so I haven’t much time to read. I hope things are well in your corner of the world – we are certainly in turmoil here in Canada with all the US tariff talk going on! I never thought I would see the day where US talk of annexing Canada would actually be a serious subject for discussion, especially when we have been such good neighbours for centuries.
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Happy to see you back and look forward to catching up with you. Like Anne above I still use Classic Editor, btw. Block Editor is a nightmare so if you can find a work around go for it. The Happiness Engineers know how to get you back to Classic IF you pester them enough. 😉
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Thanks for the tip Ally! I haven’t written enough yet to know if I need to switch back yet. I wrote some blogs on the block editor before I left, but I have a really old theme, so with all the updates I’m not sure how it will go.
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I am so happy to see you blogging again. I have stopped by your blog a few times just to see if I missed anything. I’m so sorry to hear about your surgery and especially about your mom passing away. I know you and she were very close. I lost my dad in December. Thankfully I had my sister to help deal with his affairs. It was still difficult.
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Thanks Ruth. I’m sorry to hear about your bad news. My mother was 98 and lived a good long life, but I guess we are never prepared to lose a parent, no matter their age. I think I was sort of numb the first 6 months, and busy with all the estate stuff, so I feel like I am just starting to grieve now, esp. with mother’s day coming up. PS. I know I was bad for not posting sooner, but I just didn’t have the energy. Linda encouraged me to come back! re my surgery – I am okay now, just down to a once a year checkup with the cardiologist, and only 2 meds, a betablocker for HR, (which saps your energy) and a baby aspirin, but I wouldn’t want to go through that again! It was a 6 month recovery.
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