Friday Favorites: Books made into Movies/TV shows

Happy Friday! Thank goodness it is finally almost the weekend. Tomorrow I have a nice 9 mile run planned, followed by my regular Pilates class. 

Once again this week I have a Friday Favorite for you that is not about running!  Some of you may be familiar with the show Dexter on Showtime?  Well I had heard about it from friends but I had never watched it because we don't have the Showtime channel.  I just happened to be at the library a few weeks ago and a book caught my eye.  It was on the "Hot Book" shelf with many other popular books. 

It was the latest novel in the Dexter series by Jeff Lindsay and I was quite intrigued so I went to the regular book shelves and looked for the first book in the series.  Happily my library had all the books, so I checked out the first two books.

In general I have always tried to follow the rule of reading the book, before seeing the movie and in this case I felt no different.  I wanted to read these books before seeing the TV shows.  I flew through the first book and could not put it down! I was actually reading this right after I ran the marathon and this book kept me up late a few nights which was not really conducive to a good marathon recovery. 

Currently I am more than half way through the second book and I already know I need to hit up the library soon to get the next few books of the series.  I always love a good mystery book and these do not disappoint.  Plus I can't wait to watch the Dexter TV series to see how they compare (or differ)!  I have heard that the first season of Dexter follows the first book very closely but after, the remaining seasons differ greatly from the books. 

I think it is kind of cool to read a book before seeing the movie - I go into the movie knowing that it wont be the same as the book and I am ok with that.  I like to see the different perspectives that the movie producer had compared to what the author was thinking/writing.  Plus I also like to compare it to my perceptions and ideas from when I was reading the book.


Fun Fact: Jeff Lindsay (the author) is the pen name of Jeffrey P. Freundlich.  And his wife is the niece of Ernest Hemingway!


Do you like to read books before they are made into a movie or TV show??

Friday Favorites: Vegetable Gardens

I thought I would kick off this summer with some Friday Favorite posts.  I wanted to start by showing parts of my life that don't necessarily come up when I talk about running.  And since I am kind of in non-training mode for a bit, it gives me a chance to share other parts of my life.  So today I present my vegetable garden!

Brian and I planted carrots, broccoli, green and red peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and yellow and green zucchini (planted from nearest to farthest).

Two pots of Zucchini

About a month ago, Brian and I started ripping out the garden by the side of our garage.  It was overgrown and full of weeds because the previous house owners really did not take care of the gardens.  We pulled everything out, added a nice store edge thanks to our neighbors who had old stones they were throwing away.  Then we added nice top soil and peet moss to hopefully create some good soil for our plants.  We added the fence to hopefully keep out the bunnies. 

We may have gone a little overboard when we bought the vegetable plants because I ended up having to plant a bunch into pots - we now have 5 different large pots filled with vegetables.

It has been almost a month since we first put in the plants and we are starting to see them grow! They have gotten so big and we already have some yellow zucchini growing!

Plus our first tomato is already on one of the plants.  I am hoping by the end of the summer we are over-run with veggies!

I think the reason I wanted to have a garden this year is because my grandfather always had one.  Whenever I would visit in the summer, we would go into the backyard and pick fresh cucumbers for lunch or tomatoes for dinner.  Even though my grandfather died when I was 14, it feels like his memory lives on because he passed on the tradition to me of having a garden.

Happy Friday!