The holidays are a special time of the year as families gather together to enjoy each other’s company. You’ve worked hard to make your family and friends feel welcome in your home. Hosting this year’s holiday festivities also means you have the tremendous task of cleaning it all up. Where do you start? The after holiday clean up can be an exhausting job, but it doesn’t have to be. It took a village to create the mess, have some of the villagers assist in cleaning it up! Here are some suggestions to keep the cleanup under control both during and after your holiday celebrations.


If you are hosting the holidays, chances are you already have a lot on your plate. With all the cooking and preparation, it’s only reasonable that your guests should lend you a hand with the clean up. Instruct family members, beforehand, that they will be expected to tidy up their personal spaces. Hopefully, if overnight guests see you straightening up around the house, they will be inclined to help. They can assist with folding laundry, dirty dishes and assembling meals.


When preparing food, designate a person to wash dishes or stack them in the dishwasher as they pile up. Put condiments and food supplies away before moving on to the next dish. After the evening meal, wash dinner dishes before beginning dessert. You will breathe a sigh of relief when at the end of the night the kitchen will be one less mess you have to clean.

Book Description:

After helping her grandfather at their Boston auction house, Miranda Wimplegate discovers she's accidentally sold a powerful family's prized portrait to an anonymous bidder. Desperate to appease the furious family, her grandfather tracks it to the Missouri Ozarks and makes an outlandish offer to buy the local auction house if they promise not to sell anything until he arrives.

Upon their arrival, however, they discover their new business doesn't deal in fine antiques, but in livestock. And its manager, ruggedly handsome Wyatt Ballentine, is frustrated to discover his fussy new bosses don't know a thing about the business he's single-handedly kept afloat. Faced with more cattle than they can count--but no mysterious painting--Miranda and Wyatt form an unlikely but charged partnership to try and salvage a bad situation getting worse. 

About the Author:

Regina Jennings is a graduate of Oklahoma Baptist University with a degree in English and a history minor. She is the author of A Most Inconvenient Marriage, Sixty Acres and a Bride, and Caught in the Middle, and contributed a novella to A Match Made in Texas. Regina has worked at the Mustang News and First Baptist Church of Mustang, along with time at the Oklahoma National Stockyards and various livestock shows. She now lives outside Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, with her husband and four children and can be found online at www.reginajennings.com. 



Billy's Thoughts:

Big Bang Generation
by Gary Russell
Publisher: Broadway Books
Pub. Date: September 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1101905814
Pages: 240
Buy Link: Amazon

Review:

With Series Nine (well, Season Nine here in the United States) done with, Doctor Who fans has some time to waste while waiting for this years Christmas Special to air on Dec. 25th. There are plenty of Doctor Who fiction titles in bookstores to keep you busy, like this year's The Glamour Chronicles series.

Released in September from Broadway Books, Doctor Who: Big Bang Generation features a brand-new adventure starring the Twelfth Doctor, minus the companion Clara.

The plot centers on a time portal opening up in Sydney Cover, Australia that leaves behind a huge pyramid near the Harbour Bridge. This strange event gets the attention of Professor Horace Jaanson, Cyrrus "the mobster" Globb and an alien assassin, Kik. To make things even more complicated, a group of con artists arrive to investigate the pyramid, which consists of Legs, Dog Boy, Shortie, Da Trowel and their leader - Doc.

Product Description:

Step inside American Horror Story: Freak Show, the terrifyingly twisted reincarnation of TV’s most shockingly original series. Jessica Lange leads an extraordinary, award-winning cast that includes Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, Sarah Paulson and Michael Chiklis. Lange plays Elsa Mars, the proprietor of a troupe of human “curiosities” on a desperate journey of survival in the sleepy hamlet of Jupiter, Florida, in 1952. Her menagerie of performers includes a two-headed, telepathic twin (Paulson), a take-charge bearded lady (Bates), a vulnerable strongman (Chiklis) and his sultry, three-breasted wife (Bassett). But the strange emergence of a dark entity will savagely threaten the lives of townsfolk and freaks alike. 


Billy's Thoughts:

Book Description:

At thirty-two Kimberly Rossi, a finance officer at a Lexus car dealership, has had her heart broken more times than she wants to remember. With two failed engagements, a divorce and again alone with no prospects, she hardly seems the type to dream of being a published romance author. Dreading another holiday alone, she signs up for The Mistletoe Retreat, a nine-day writing retreat in Burlington, VT. Deep inside Kimberly knows she’s at a junction in her life and it’s time to either fulfill her dream or let it go. The other reason she decides to attend the conference is because famed romance writer, H.T. Cowell, once the best selling romance writer in America, and the author whose books instilled in her the desire to be a writer, will be speaking in public for the first time in more than a decade.

In one of her breakout sessions Kimberly meets another aspiring writer, and one of the few men at the conference, Zeke, an intelligent man with a wry wit who seems as interested in Kimberly as he is in the retreat. As Kimberly begins to open up to him about her stories and dreams, she inadvertently reveals her own troubled past. As Zeke helps her to discover why her books fail to live up to their potential she begins to wonder if he’s really talking more about her life than her literature. But as she grows closer to him, she realizes that Zeke has his own darkness, a past he’s unwilling to talk about.


About the Author:

Richard Paul Evans is the #1 bestselling author of The Christmas Box. Each of his more than twenty-five novels has been a New York Times bestseller. There are more than twenty million copies of his books in print worldwide, translated into more than twenty-four languages. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Mothers Book Award, the Romantic Times Best Women’s Novel of the Year Award, the German Audience Gold Award for Romance, two Religion Communicators Council Wilbur Awards, the Washington Times Humanitarian of the Century Award and the Volunteers of America National Empathy Award. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife, Keri, and their five children. You can learn more about Richard on Facebook at  Facebook.com/RPEFans, or visit his website, RichardPaulEvans.com. 


Billy's Thoughts:

Billy's Thoughts:

If you want schedule next week's post, click here to find the next prompt question. To submit a question, fill out this form.

What to do:

1. Post on your blog answering this question:

  This week's question is submitted by Elizabeth @ Silver's Reviews!

Are you a blogger that only has reviews on your blog or do you feature giveaways and attention-attracting posts such as personal and bookish posts?

2. Enter the link to your post in the linky list below (enter your Blog Name and the direct link to your post answering this week’s question. Failure to do so will result in removal of your link).


3. Visit other blogs in the list and comment on their posts. Try to spend some time on the blogs reading other posts and possible become a new follower.  The purpose of the hop is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, befriend other bloggers, and receive new followers to your own blog.

  

My Answer: 

   I try to post a variety of posts, such as book reviews, product reviews, DVD/Blu-ray reviews, Holiday events, Gift Guides, ramblings and a few giveaways.

Whispers in the Reading Room
by Shelly Gray
Publisher: Zondervan
Pub. Date: November 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0310338499
Pages: 352
Buy Link: http://bit.ly/1lujxr6
Blog Tour: http://litfusegroup.com/author/sgray

Review:

I wasn't aware that author Shelly Shepard Gray also writes under just "Shelly Gray" for some of her titles. I'm a fan of her Amish romances, so I was excited to receive a review copy of Whispers in the Reading Room. Little did I know that it was book 3 in the A Chicago World's Fair Mystery; which I have never read the other two books.

Whispers in the Reading Room centers on Lydia Bancroft, a librarian who has become fascinated by a man that has been coming into the library to read books, but he never checks any them out. She doesn't know his name, well, until she bumps into him at the Hartman Hotel and learns that his name is Sebastian Marks. She also learns that he is rich and lives at the top of the hotel.

This is a romance novel, so of course there are sparks between the two. However, Sebastian is keeping a slight secret from her about the businesses that he owns. It turns out that he's the owner of an infamous saloon and several gambling clubs.

Product Review:

'Tis the season to shell out some justice with 3 throwback Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episodes! Get in the holiday spirit with Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michelangelo as they pass out some season's beatings to a gang of thieves, Foot Tech Ninjas and the Purple Dragons!


Billy's Thoughts: