A Jar Opening Weekly Link Round-Up

Something I've always wished to be is a dedicated diarist. I love buying journals. The silky feel of page after page of brand-new paper just waiting for the touch of my pen. Unfortunately, I am rotten at it. Oh, I'll keep up with the daily entries for a week or two, maybe even a month, and then it's back to radio silence. The only journals I'm A #1 at keeping are my book journals. 

The sole times I've ever been good at keeping a journal were when I was fighting severe depression. There I could write down everything I wouldn't say to the people in my life. I've destroyed all those journals. No one needs to see into my abyss. 

But I still wanted some sort of record of my year. 

I found something in an online magazine about getting a jar and, once a week, putting in a slip of paper on which you've written the best thing that happened that particular week. Now this I thought I had a good chance of being able to accomplish. And guess what? I was right. 

There have been some pretty nasty things happen to me (and the world) in 2016, but the Mason jar you see in the photo has helped me focus on the positive. There were several weeks when I had to choose between several "best" things, and there was a week here and there when I really had to search for that one good thing to write on a slip of paper. But I always found something. (One week it was watching two butterflies do a love dance around my birds of paradise.)

On New Year's Eve, I'll be opening my jar and reading all those slips of paper. And remembering fifty-two good things that happened during 2016. May the memories you focus on be as pleasant.

 

►Books, Movies & Other Interesting Tidbits◄

• Amazon has put a limit on non-purchase reviews, which affects many book bloggers like me.
• In an era of fear and division, fiction plays a vital role in dramatizing difference and encouraging empathy.
• Libraries promise to destroy user data to avoid the threat of government surveillance. 
• Banned books and blockbusters. How the publishing industry took on the taboo.
• This is Amazon's grocery store of the future: no cashiers, no registers, and no lines. 
• One of the UK's masters of crime fiction, Val McDermid, says, "It doesn't get easier, it gets harder!" 

►Channeling My Inner Indiana Jones◄

• A huge 3,000-year-old gold "belt" has been unearthed in the UK. 
• Watch a destroyed 17th-century map get painstakingly restored. 
• Forty-eight bodies have been unearthed at a Black Plague burial site in England. 
• A rare Ming Dynasty banknote has been found inside an ancient sculpture. 
• A 7th-century Sutton Hoo ship burial reveals that the British were trading with the Middle East 1,300 years ago. 
• A mummy mystery has been solved with the identification of Queen Nefertari's legs. 
• A 1,000-year-old Viking toolbox has been found at a mysterious Danish fortress. 

►Channeling My Inner Elly Mae Clampett◄

• Fifteen hilarious signs spotted at the zoo. 
• Be prepared for some wonderful images: National Geographic's Nature Photographer of the Year contest.  
• Tiny bird goggles allow an innovative study of flight. 
• A herd of deer in a Phoenix suburb is a rare sight. 

►The Happy Wanderer◄

• The Literary Man looks like the perfect place for a book lover to stay.
• The Thousand-Year Rose on Germany's Hildesheim Cathedral.
• Research on the Chinese haze helps crack the mystery of London's deadly 1952 fog. 
• Did you know that there's a section of Route 66 in New Mexico that plays "America the Beautiful" when it's driven over at a specific speed?

►Fascinating Folk◄

• Dorothy Kilgallen's tell-all story on a mobster tied to JFK's assassination may have gotten her killed. 
• Twenty women inventors you should know.

►I ♥ Lists◄

• Seven writers on their favorite bookstores.  
• Thirty-two of the most beautiful book covers of 2016.
• On the reading habits of notorious criminals. 
• The top ten cats in literature. 
• Twenty-five authors on the best books they've ever received.

That's all for this week! Don't forget to stop by next Friday when I'll be sharing a freshly selected batch of links for your surfing pleasure.

Have a great weekend, and read something fabulous!