Today was my very first foray into joining a ‘book club.’ If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may know that I recently moved back to Phoenix (well, it’s been 2 1/2 months, so maybe that’s not so ‘recently’) and am actively searching for fun friends. I’m absolutely sure I’ll meet some cool people at work but, since I haven’t started working yet, I thought I’d get a head start on making some new friends out of work.
Enter: book clubs! Combine reading + new friends + talking about books + refreshments and me, and what do you get? A very happy Melissa indeed! I’m part of this ‘New to Phoenix’ ladies-only Meetup group (by the way, if you haven’t checked out meetup.com and you’re looking to meet people/do stuff, I highly suggest you check it out!), and they just started a new monthly book club event. Hooray!
The location of this book club was pretty far from where I live, but it was in a super familiar part of town (basically, the side of town where I grew up), so I was acquainted with the location and knew exactly how to get there. I think if I hadn’t been familiar with the area, I would have passed on this event and waited for the next book club meet up, but I lucked out.
We read Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen (summary here), and I thought the book was really good. I’m not really into reading fiction books on my own, and I highly doubt I would have ever chosen to read this book if it hadn’t been “required.” However, I’m really glad I read it because it was a cute and short book, the kind you can’t really put down.
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So, did I make any friends? I definitely can say I made one friend for sure (she happens to live across the street from me, so we may carpool for future meet ups!) but I’m unsure as to whether or not we would get along. She’s my age, but she’s very, very opinionated and I feel like I might tire of that rather quickly… there were two other ladies I hit it off with (one who is in her early 30s and the other is more late 30s), but didn’t get to talk to a lot, so we’ll see. I wasn’t brave enough to get their phone numbers or exchange emails, but hopefully at the next book club event, we’ll get to talk more.
As for the Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead Reboot, I’m still sitting on a 5-lb. loss. The boyfriend and I have dropped strength training from our workout routine and have just been doing cardio, so we’ll see if that pumps up the weight loss any faster. I’m personally okay with just doing cardio for now, because I had kinda fallen off the whole ‘Run to 5k’ challenge, and now I’m back on it 
And as for my upcoming trip? Guess where I’m going?!
Portland, Oregon! Woohoo!! This is kind of like my graduation present/trip from my parents, although I’m just going with my Dad. We’ll be there for 5 days, and I’m super excited. It’s the perfect place for a vegetarian ‘hippie’ like myself! I’ll be sure to share photos with you all when I return!
That said… do you have any suggestions for places/restaurants/food carts to visit in Portland? I have a list of places I’d like to go, but if anyone wants to share their suggestions, I’m all ears!
