Bookish (and not so Bookish) Thoughts

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1. Yesterday my mom and sisters back home in Modesto had to make the incredibly sad decision to put down our family dog, Oscar. Oscar was a mutt that I rescued from my high school campus fall of my senior year (so back in 2000). He was maybe five or six or seven months when we got him, making him almost sixteen years old. The art teacher had taken him and kept him safe while I asked my mom if we could keep him. The next day my boyfriend drove the pup and I home, after permission had been granted. He was a really great dog and lived a long, happy, healthy life. 

[I am too lazy to edit this, sorry]

2. On a happier note, Cordie, our golden, turned eleven over the weekend. We celebrated with homemade banana muffins, her favorite. 

3. I was walking at this little outdoor pond place nearby our house and this lady with a little girl stopped me to tell me how cute my kid was and to chat, I guess. I was friendly and whatnot, but confused. Did she want to be friends? Set up play dates? Steal my child? Did I miss an opportunity to make a new friend? Or save myself from being invited to her Stroller Strides class?

4. I watched an actual movie last weekend, Sicario, with Emily Blunt. It was good, but it was one of those movies that was either super quiet or super loud and I find that highly annoying. 

5. I'm rereading The Awakening by Kate Chopin for the fourth or fifth time, for work. It takes on a whole new meaning now that I'm a mother. 

6. I'm also reading Helen Ellis' short story collection American Housewife, since I though it would pair nicely with Chopin's novella. So far I'm finding the stories a little uneven, but it's early.

7. Twice a week, for three weeks, I am stuck in a freezing, dreary conference room all day listening to students do something called Interactive Oral Commentaries (IOCs) for IB. They speak for eight minutes straight on a Sylvia Plath poem, I question them on it for two minutes, and then we have a "conversation" on either Macbeth or Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family for ten minutes (twenty minutes per kid, total). It's an interesting day, and it's nice to see the kids' faces when they're finally done, but man, is it long towards the end (I sit with thirteen kids a day). 

8. The other day I went to Trader Joe's for an onion, salsa, and gnocchi for Sawyer. I walked out with all of that, plus $25 of other stuff that we didn't really need. One of those things were Danish Pancakes, which are little balls of pancake goodness. Go get them. And the Dark Chocolate Mini Heart Cookies. 

9. I built this organizer the other day all by myself. It really was actually quite easy, but trying to do it with a toddler underfoot proved to be a little irritating (sure, shred the Styrofoam it came in all over the damn living room, yeah, just do it and leave me alone so I can do this). I feel like I'm a bad feminist for being proud of myself for doing something that involves such a stereotypical male thing (tools! lifting! swearing when things weren't lining up!), but what can you do. 

10. I swore up and down that I was going to save my Anthropologie give card for spring or summer clothes, but I saw this jacket and caved in. I'm super stingy with my cash (usually), but gift cards burn a serious hole in my pocket. I tried.