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Infinite Country by Patricia Engel | Thoughts

   Published : 2021   ||    Format : print   ||    Location : Colombia ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆   What was it about the country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.. Thoughts : Infinite Country follows two characters - young Talia, who at the beginning of this book, escapes a girl’s reform school in North Colombia so that she can make her previously booked flight to the US. Before she can do that, she needs to travel many miles to reach her father and get her ticket to the rest of her family. As we follow Talia’s treacherous journey south, we learn about how she ended up in the reform school in the first place and why half her family resides in the US. Infinite Country tells the story of her family through the other protagonist, El

Exhaustion and disappointment | Weekly Snapshot

Hello May! It's good to be officially out of the months that are typically cold here. 



Life

Our house painting is all done at this point! Whew! Of course, we didn't wield a single paintbrush except when choosing colors, which is why it even got done so fast. Regardless, I cannot be more thrilled with how our house looks now. I will say there is a predominance of blue (several different shades) in most of the common living areas - I've been going for a cool palette so cool grays and blues were where my eyes were drawn to. It took a total of 10 days, exterior painting included, and we are still putting things back where they belong. Almost every day, the painting crew was here from 8am until almost 8pm in the evening, so I applaud all that hard work. It did leave us very exhausted though since our routines went haywire. The days when the master suite was being painted, we camped in a guest room. The kids enjoyed the change in scenery, okay, who am I kidding - I enjoyed that too. Can you tell that I typically enjoy playing house? There's still more things to put back, but we are using this opportunity to Marie Kondo our house because, gosh, how fast stuff accumulates and takes over any room!

Thank goodness there was something to celebrate because there has been not so good stuff on the Covid front in India. Over the past few weeks, we've been hearing of someone we know or someone they know getting infected or hospitalized every day. It's been truly scary, especially with no ICU beds or oxygen available in some states. Entire residential zones have had to be marked quarantine zones. One of my aunts' family of six had been severely sick for a week but thankfully they have all recovered. Considering how bad it has been, we have been expecting the number of flight restrictions to increase and sure enough with the US joining the list, my family is not going to be able to visit us next week after all. We had been looking forward to this so we are disappointed, but the restrictions are fully justified - the Indian government went too lax and now they have no clue what to do. 

Thankfully, most of our family is fully vaccinated and their state is not among the worst hit. Since our entire summer was based on the assumption that we'll have family here, we are now scrambling to make childcare plans. I'm hoping we'll have all this sorted out soon enough.


Reading

With all the painting going on last week, I took a couple of days off reading. And then started reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. As hoped, it takes off right from page one and promised to be an entertaining read. I'm only about a quarter of my way in (slow reading thanks to so much going on IRL) but I love it and cannot wait to get to the end of it. In many ways, it reminds me of everything I liked about Weir's first book, The Martian.



I have still been reading Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, but I hate to say that this book is going very slow for me. It's really hard to read more than a few pages at a time because the narrator's stream of consciousness and obsession with astrology is just not pulling me in. I'll be continuing with it because I'd like to see how it ends but it likely will be at a rate of a few pages a day. 


Watching

We are finally done with Deep Space 9! I know this Star Trek installment has plenty of mixed reviews, but I for one, actually enjoyed most of it. I just wish the whole Prophets bit could have been left out - that went for far too long, in my opinion. The Cardassian drama was more interesting. Now we are rewatching the Voyager series mostly for my daughter's sake. After seeing so many men on screen, I want her to see some nice strong women in uniform, at least until Discovery is back. 


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Linking with The Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz and The Sunday Post at Caffeinated Reviewer

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