Friday Bitch & Brag*

December 29, 2023 Edition & The Year in Bitching & Bragging

Exclusive for paid subscribers: the Corinne Channel is a roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to over the past week. This list will be included at the end of each Friday Bitch and Brag.

In case you missed an older Friday Bitch & Brag, you can check out the index here.

This week was crazy busy, so I’m late with the weekly edition—but right on time for including a special update on a year of bitching and bragging.

Bitch: My usual sense of disassociation & discombobulation that happens in the final weeks of a year has been combined with way too many tasks that needed completion before year end. Several of those tasks could have been done before Christmas, but that damn Effexor threw me off track…

Brag: …but last week, I started a lower dose of Effexor in non-extended release form that’s made all the nasty withdrawal symptoms go away. I can taper off this tablet much more smoothly—I hope.

Bonus Item: Max the cat continues to live his best life with Pops and Mari, as he now has a heated seat, a fluffy cat bed, and a four-level cat tree in the screened porch. I suspect Boots mocks him in cat-speak when he saunters by, yet is also jealous.

Max telling me not to bother him while he is sleeping

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Bitch: I have become a pain au chocolat snob this year, thanks in part to a couple of local bakeries that make excellent ones. Yesterday I met Rimi for a late breakfast at a little café in Bethesda and ordered one along with some tea. When I finally got my order, I was not pleased at the minimal amount of chocolat and the overwhelming amount of pain. C'est dommage.

Brag: Right before Christmas, I decided I wanted to send out New Year’s cards, so I ordered two packs of positively reviewed cards over on the online behemoth. Over the holiday weekend, I assembled my address labels and printed them out, then sat at the kitchen table affixing labels and stamps, and writing personal notes while blasting holiday tunes. I mailed about 30 cards on Wednesday and have around a dozen more to send.

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Big news: Reading with Expression will get a makeover & rebranding in early 2024—be sure to subscribe to be the first to get all the details!

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Bitch: I have been part of a 30-day challenge to create a personal plan for 2024, and I am way behind in my assignments. It was going really well for the first two weeks, and then I got busy, distracted, and sick (not in that order). You can guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

Brag: I also participated in a 12 Days to Christmas fitness challenge with Fitness with PJ, and that challenge went much better (even if I finished it this morning). PJ is about my age, is highly skilled as a fitness coach for women over 40 years old, and her sense of humor is similar to my own: often wildly inappropriate and downright wacky. I will do more challenges with her in the future.

And now for the weekly media wrap-up on The Corinne Channel, PLUS a wrap-up of the content I loved and hated over the past year: novels, documentaries, film/TV versions of books, albums, and more!