It got busy this week! Lots going on at home, work, and otherwise as well. Life My daughter's school decided to close on Friday, along with several other schools in the area, with some being closed from Thursday. Not enough staff. The school had been on a mask mandate since the beginning of the pandemic, dropping it only for one week when the pandemic had appeared to have stabilized last year. And yet, they dropped the mandate completely at the beginning of this year, when cases were exponentially rising, only to bring it back again starting next week. I've gone from being very annoyed to angry to feeling fatigue in these first two weeks already. I won't lie - we all mask around here and try to avoid going where we don't have a need to be in, and still, we are not taking anything close to the extreme precaution we all took at the beginning of the pandemic. I cannot and don't want to keep my kids home - I have at least that much faith in the schools' precautions
It's July. We are officially at the halfway mark and it's honestly shocking sometimes how fast time flies. I started the year with generous goals and I haven't managed to reach the halfway point. But that's alright. I've been reading good books, I had loads of stuff happening this year (parents visiting, brother visiting, two long vacations, couple of side interests) - so it's always good when you do something other than reading. Moreover, it took me a while to accept that what I really need to read now are fast books. So lately, I've been on the hunt for just such books.
After yearning for a brainless read, I got just that with the Vampire Diaries book. I talked a little about my reaction to this book here, especially in comparison to the TV show, but to sum it up, you're not missing anything by not reading this book. The TV show is certainly more intriguing and three-dimensional while the book is just shallow and vapid.
This week, I started reading Transatlantic by Colum McCann. McCann's been on my radar ever since he published Let the Great World Spin. Transatlantic straddles three historic moments - a black American slave's attempts to propagate ideas of freedom in Ireland in 1845, the first transatlantic flight by Alcock and Brown in 1919, and an American senator's search of lasting Irish peace in 1998. Transatlantic was a little hard to get into at first - but after giving it a few more pages' try yesterday, I'm eager to read more.I'm also listening to Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, which is quite enlightening, to be honest, but it's hard to not feel depressed after listening to him talk about how much non-real food has encroached into the food industry. Pretty much everything we buy today is processed and after years of being ingrained in a certain way of eating, it can be hard for anyone to start over. 'Live like the cavemen lived' is no longer a workable advice.
What I'm excited about...
Next, I'm hoping to start reading The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. Toro's new movie, Pacific Rim, has the husband all excited, and me eager to read his Strain trilogy. I've heard of these books for a long time but it's only now that I finally decided to give the books a chance.
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