Happy Sunday! Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at ReaderBuzz. Check out her post and the links to see what other bloggers have been up to in the last week.

How’s the weather?

I can see redbuds budding outside my window as I type.

We had a day where the temperature reached 80 and felt hot, but mostly we’re enjoying cool nights and pleasant days.

What are you reading?

I read three Alexis Hall books back-to-back-to-back. That was fun! I’m taking a break so that I can write blog posts about them before I forget what I read.

What are you watching?

We’ve had a theme going for several months about the Watergate scandal as it’s been presented in film.

It started with Dick (1999), a teen comedy with Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams that we missed when it was first released.

That led us to a re-watch of All the President’s Men.

We don’t usually watch documentaries, but given our current interest in Watergate, we enjoyed The Martha Mitchell Effect (2022) streaming on Netflix.

That led us to our current binge, Gaslit (2022). Julia Roberts plays Martha Mitchell and Sean Penn is barely recognizable as John Mitchell. Dan Stevens (Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey) plays John Dean.

I’m learning so much! I was 10 when the Watergate break-in happened and 11 the summer of 1973 when the Watergate hearings were broadcast. I remember the hearings as a constant background to that summer but had little understanding of what was going on. Since Watergate was a current event of my childhood, I’ve never studied it as history. I feel like there are huge gaps in my knowledge that Gaslit is helping to bridge.

Gaslit is streaming on Starz, but we got the DVDs from Netflix.

What are you writing?

I got back to work on my novel last week. Not much actual writing, but I did the research that I needed to understand what my code-breaking characters did during their workday — at least, good enough for this draft. This feels like a topic that I could spend months exploring and would include multiple visits to the National Archive in Washington DC. But that’s probably overkill. I would end up learning more details of the nuts and bolts of deciphering than any reader would want as part of their novel-reading experience.

What are you doing?

I’m in the midst of the A-to-Z Challenge, posting little research projects about 1943 in Washington, DC — the setting for my novel. The most popular post this week was E is for Easter, due to this lovely photo of a flower vendor.

A flower stand photographed by John Collier, Jr. in Washington DC in April 1943. From the Library of Congress.

My favorite post of the week, though, didn’t fit with my alphabet — it was an exploration of BBC radio programming that US listeners could hear over their airwaves in 1943. That was my British Isles Friday post.

How are you this fine Sunday?