International Woman’s Day

Today is International Women’s Day, a day that started back in 1909 in New York by the Socialist Party of America who did it to remember the strike in 1908 by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.  It became “international” a year later when at the International Women’s Conference was held in Copenhagen, Denmark when 100 women from 17 countries wanted women to have equal rights. In 1977 the United Nations General Assembly asked their members to proclaim March 8th as the UN Day for women’s rights and world peace.  

When it comes to gender equality there have been a lot of changes made over the past few decades that are very positive. For some countries it is what you would expect but for some others that have made incredible strides it is surprising. Namibia is now listed as one of the top gender equal countries. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230927-the-worlds-most-gender-equal-countries#

The US is so far behind in many cases when it comes to employment and wages of women in a predominately male work force. While it has improved, it still has a long way to go. The following link shows you how many women are elected in the US and in Fortune 500 companies currently https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/the-data-on-women-leaders/

In 2009 President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which disallows wage discrimination based on sex of employee.  BUT Congress still has not passed the Paycheck Fairness Act first introduced in 1997, which will allow women to challenge wage disparities easier. Which means for over 25 years this Act has hit a road block every single time.  Then there has been lots of stories in the past few years about women’s medical rights when it comes to specific things, for many it seems like a step back not just a few years but more like generations or even centuries.

In sports there has been some huge head way especially when it comes to equal pay, publicity and more. For many women in sports as athletes they would not get the sponsorship or pay like the men would so would have work multiple jobs to survive. In soccer/football there was an announcement made that the women would be getting more equal pay. Which was important because for some countries, the women’s team was actually doing way better than the men’s were. We have seen more women being involved on the fields, the courts, the ice, the slopes and more as both athletes and as trainers/coaches/managers. Then the best news was announced recently stating that this summer for the Paris Olympics there will actually be equality, meaning for the first time there will be 50% of each sex participating.

When I did a blog on a similar subject in 2016, I highlight one book that talked about a woman owning a professional sports team and promoted it as it was one of the first ones I knew about. Since there I am happy to say there have been numerous more books written talking about women and sports. So trying to find one book to talk about was hard, so I decided to list some instead because well I couldn’t.

Power Play – Kat Mizera – Harper has been through a lot in her life and is now battling her 2 step-sons for the ownership of the LA Phantoms hockey team her late husband left her, not them. She will do anything to prove she knows what she is doing, including making sure Gabe a great player and her ex becomes part of the team too. Will he be willing to move again and will they finally realize that the connection they once had, never actually left.

Drake – Sawyer Bennett – Brienne became the owner of the Pittsburg Titans NHL hockey team after a tragedy that cost the life of not only her brother but almost every member of the team. So now she had to rebuild a team from scratch and convincing Drake that he needs to come back to the game he loves might be harder than she thinks. But she will not take no for an answer.

Covering Kendall – Julie Brannagh – Kendall becomes the GM of the San Francisco Miners NFL team, a position she worked hard to get and knows to keep it she will need to work even harder, so romance is far from her mind. But one day, one night spent with Drew might change all that. That was until they realized that Drew played for the Miners rival team. Now they have to figure out if going beyond a one night stand and keeping it all a secret is worth it.

Playing to Win – Kim Findlay – Jayna is one of the top female hockey players and even an Olympic Gold medal winner but an injury has taken her off the ice. So now she must watch from the sidelines and work for her former team as well as the NHL team Toronto Blaze. Braydon worked hard to make it to the NHL and now he might have ruined his chances because of something he said about the first female NHL goalie, his teammate. Together Braydon and Jayna must work together to repair more than just him playing in the NHL, but also how little exposure women’s professional hockey has.

These 4 books are just the tip of the iceberg because there are so many more out there for you to enjoy. I can only hope there are more to come in the future not just in sports but also in other areas where women are making incredible strides.

Second Chance At Love

Did you have a crush on someone back in high school and college that maybe never happened or if it did just a little while and then you grew apart? I’m sure lots of us had those at one time in our life. Now some of us can laugh at the crush we had back then because if we went to a reunion that hot high school guy is now bald, gained 100 pounds and a used car salesman or the gorgeous girl has been married a few times, works in a restaurant but yet still trying to look like she is back in high school. Now I am not saying there is anything wrong with being a used car salesman or a waitress at all because those are great jobs and definitely necessary. I’m just stating a fact that I ran into at one of my class reunions. We also had a guy who was a geek now awesome at his job and looking pretty handsome, some jocks still playing sports, a couple of stayed in their fields of study and are doing well, etc.. But one of the greatest things we saw at the reunions was that a few people who crushed on each other during high school actually rekindled their romance a few decades later and are so happy with each other. So it does show that there is always a chance that love can happen at any age in our lives and to never give up. It also shows that we have this mindset sometimes back in school of what people should be when they “grow up” and sometimes those standards are pretty high, not only in our minds but in the minds of the individual.

This brings me to the following book – Catch & Release by Tracy Solheim. It was just released today and is one that you need to add to your TBR list. I have read Tracy’s books for year and are lucky to get an ARC to review. I will admit that this one seem to go a little slow at the beginning but I am not sure if it was the book itself or maybe just the mood I was in because I know that does play a factor. The couple though does have a chemistry and now to find out if it can stand the test of time. While this book is 3rd in the series, it is a stand alone so you can read it before the others. You will though in it get a glimpse of some of the other characters in the series as they are intertwined in this.

With a name like Trey Van Horn in a book you can’t help but visualize this tall, good looking, rich, jock who always gets what he wants, in your head. Reading this book, Trey definitely lived up to his name. He is the star Quarterback for the Milwaukee Growlers, comes from a rich family and strict in so many ways. When a woman from his past popped up not only in his work life but also his personal life, all those rules he had set were about to go right out the door. Could he handle her being there again or would he let the past information & his parent’s failed marriages/relationships rule the way he continued his life. 

London Headley was successful in so many ways in the PR business and the company Westwood Agency. Now that the Agency would be bought by a very well known company she knew she had to work harder, especially on one of that company’s biggest clients and the yearly Growler Gala. But what she had never imagined that she would be seeing her first love, the first boy to break her heart, in her life again, Trey. But there he was front and center being the Growler’s rep for the Gala. She also had thought she was completely over him, but once she saw him, all those teenage hormones came back full force. Now the question was if he would break her heart again as they became Friends with Benefits, or would he finally be ready to talk about why he truly hated commitment. 

https://books2read.com/Growlers3?fbclid=IwAR2qm_4GFe4UItrVWONgF_RKhr6JcfAnZigle8a46dXhlMUpuzhpsdF4piU

Can you penalize a secret?

Everyone has at least one secret in their life. It can be something simple, it can be something silly, it can be something that will upset someone, it can be something you were told/ordered to keep because of your job, it can be something that changes not only your life but someone else’s, or it might even change multiple lives. There are some secrets that actually should never be told, they are ones that would only cause tremendous hurt and heartache in people’s lives. So as the saying goes it is better to take it to the grave.

As time has passed us by, there are more secrets, more information coming out about what took place in World War 2 and the people who kept those secrets. A lot of women were involved in breaking codes, deciphering information and more which eventually led on to helping the Allies win the war. What these individuals went through was absolutely amazing and it is exciting to see so many books coming out about them, whether it was in the US, the UK, or elsewhere, these men and women put their lives at risk to make sure that they do their part in helping to win the war. There are countless books out now, many fiction about Codebreakers, Radar, Bletchley Park and more. They are ones that you definitely need to add to your ever expanding TBR (To be read pile). I have put a list of some of them below. They are all allowing us to see things in different ways, especially when it is proving time and time again how women were given the short end of the stick when it comes to how much knowledge they have and what they could do. For many of them they never received the true recognition, let alone the benefits and thanks they truly deserved until decades later. Which for some of them was far too late. Over the years I have worked in a predominately male job and dealt with lots of questioning looks as well as doubts I could do the job. But the one thing I did know is that I didn’t have to put it up with it the way all those ladies did back then.

These are just some of the books I have read in the past year and definitely think you should take a look at them. There are countless others out there that expand into areas that you never would have imagined from creating a library in a tube tunnel during the London Blitz to handling everything for the railroads to taking over all the land/farming done by the sons and husbands and so much more. What so many of them had to over come is just amazing and many of their stories have been sadly lost. I have posted reviews on some of them on sites such as Goodreads, BookBub and Amazon.

Codebreaker’s Secret – Sara Ackerman. Is set in 2 different time frames, 1940s in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and a woman who works with the government. 1960s on the Big Island where a journalist meets a photographer and together they can solve not only a murder but some secrets.

Radar Girls – Sara Ackerman. Another novel set in Hawaii just after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Women are replacing men in many jobs including ones where they need to prove themselves over and over.

The Flight Girls – Noelle Salazar. A novel about how women became pilots in WW2 for the military delivering aircraft to various locations in the US after intense training.

The Bletchley Girls & Code Name Elodie (2 books)– Anna Stuart A 2 book series about women who worked in Bletchley Park, a place most never even heard about. Where people, especially women, from all sorts of different backgrounds came together to work out the secrets of the codes being used by the Germans. Some of which had to then put their lives on the line in order to help get an advantage in the war.

The London Girls – Soraya M Lane. Women recruited by the Royal Navy to become motorcycle dispatchers riders during World War Two. These ladies would risk life and limb in order to get special messages and classified orders to various locations throughout England.

The Little Wartime Library – Kate Thompson. Based on a historical place forgotten about, the Bethnal Green Tube Station went from an abandon project to a home, a library, a school, a beauty shop, a theater and more for thousands of people during the Blitz and then throughout the rest of World War Two. One woman along with her friend was bound and determine to make sure books were always available to read.

Hello World!

January 25, 2024 – For the past year, this website has been just sitting here as “coming soon”. I had all these ideas of what it would be like and how it would succeed in helping me overcome a shocking event.

You see this time last year before I started the webpage, I was working this great job. It was a small company, hours were great, pay was decent, been there for over 6 years and we had become a family. So when we were all called into the office we just assumed it was updated news on our boss who had been sick the year before. Instead it was us being notified that the company was closing…..in just 2 weeks.

I guess I had, we all had, ignored all the little signs that we needed to make some changes in our life. We had become too comfortable in what we were doing and the only way for us all to wake up was to give us a really good shove….this was that shove.

Luckily through a coworker I found another job (so did she) and the two of us started on a new adventure within a month. Similar work but a different workplace, different hours, no more commuting all over the country and definitely better pay and benefits.

The website I had started in the month of unemployment just continued to sit there. The idea of becoming a notary happened, but I didn’t do anything beyond that. Ideas I had had before about blogging on the books I was reading, the products I was testing, just sat in my head as well……I just became too comfortable again.

But added to that comfort was stress, more stress than I had before. While I was making more money, I seemed to have more bills, or the bills I had seemed higher now. One day off I took a good long look at everything and realized I had blown the first chance I had to fix it all. When trying to figure things out, I looked at this website and decided to give it up, just take the loss of money. But then I got a little nudge or two saying keep it but just go in a slightly different direction. 

First nudge was books. For several years now I have been honored to get advanced copies of books before they are published to review. Some are romance, some are fiction, some are historical fiction. But in the last few months I have actually been getting more opportunities for this even though I do not have a website or social media account to promote them on. I had done a blog account years ago on books but just let it slip away. So now I have decided that it is time to start again, they will be talked about on here and I have started an Instagram account specifically for books and reviews. I will post links for that shortly.

Second one was my daughter who is married to a guy in the military and they are about to PCS. She had little information and some of it was wrong. Luckily for her she had me. She knew that as a former military spouse I knew stuff, she knew I still had friends that knew stuff and she knew that I worked for a large military website for years helping others. So I sent her all the links that I had and gave her advice on where to go. She said she wished that she had groups like I had when married, because she knew of lots of other spouses out there who needed help. As I get some more time I will actually be having a page on this website with information for military families, including links to locations and other websites that can help them. I will also be offering my own help when I have the time to make sure they are going in the right direction.

There were some other small nudges that I just won’t go into right now but just know that they were definitely clear on what I need to do. If I want to make a difference in my life and help others make some difference in their own, then this is one way it might possibly be done.

The website will now be up and running. Please excuse any mistakes and things I have made because well I am still working on it. Just know that I am an email away.