My life in books:
Reading over the past couple of weeks has been good even though I was on holiday and now am grading for a course I'm teaching.
- The Outliers by Kimberly McCreight--a YA mystery
- The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis--a really good but intense YA novel
- Another Man's Ground by Claire Booth--An adult mystery/detective novel
Challenge updates:
- Read Your Own Damn Books--My goal was to read 25 books from my TBR shelves this year. So far I've read 31, adding one in the past two weeks. I've been reading a bunch of books borrowed from the library so this challenge hasn't gone very far recently.
- Travel the World in Books--The idea is to read books set in as many countries as possible. In the past two weeks I added no new countries.
- Literary Escapes--Similar to the previous challenge, this one tracks the US states. In the past two weeks I added 2 new states: Missouri and Ohio.
- Read all of the ALA YA Award Winners--complete
Luckily I am 90% on vacation now (I can never seem to stop myself from checking work email). I've had a couple meetings in the last couple of weeks, but mostly I am living my non-work life. That will end in about a week.
Family:
Well, there is a new driver on the road; my daughter passed her driver's test and for those of you who have had your own children do that, it really does mean a whole new level of independence. It's so great not to have to drive her all over town when she wants to see friends! Of course, I worry when she is out driving, but she has a good head on her shoulders and so far (2 weeks in) she is not using the radio when she drives and she texts me when she arrives somewhere and when she is leaving. That was our deal for the first month. Clever me... after the first month she goes back to boarding school where she has no car :-)
We also spent a few hours volunteering at Direct Relief International, a fantastic organization that gets supplies and medicines to disaster areas in the US and around the world. We packed hygiene kits.
Thursday night my daughter and I decided to go to San Francisco for the weekend! We booked flights using our miles, got a hotel on Union Square and we were supposed to fly out on Friday morning. AT 11:00pm I got a text from United saying our flight was delayed by 4 hours. 4 hours really cuts into a 2-day trip. Last time I got a text like this, the flight was cancelled. I sat on hold with United from 11:30pm to 12:30am and got no response. In the morning the delay was even longer so we rebooked ourselves on an afternoon flight, which worked perfectly. As we started to board, we saw that our original flight was also just boarding, but the new flight took off first!
We love SF and did museums, window shopping, visited UC Berkeley (since she wants to apply for next year), and walked. It was really fun and spontaneous.
Watching:
I found a series to watch: Criminial Minds. It's a little gruesome since it's about FBI agents tracking down serial killers, but for the most part, we don't have to see the actual killings, which makes it very watchable.
No comments
Post a Comment