Bookish (and not so Bookish) Thoughts

Today has been long and pretty darn good. I had to wake up well before dawn to head to UCLA to chaperone a field trip for Michelle Obama's College Signing Day. We spent a really, really, really long time on the bus, but it was worth it to be under the same roof as her. There were other celebrity guests who were a part of the show, like Usher, Conan, Elizabeth Banks, John Legend, but, honestly, I was there for Michelle. It's always great to return to UCLA, and my knowledge of the campus came in handy today, as we were trying to navigate Westwood. 

I just started Small Fry, the memoir by Steve Jobs' daughter, and am into it. I have resisted reading criticism, and will after I am done, but I wanted to go into it without skewing my perception. 

Last weekend we celebrated Sawyer's fifth birthday, with a small family party on Saturday, and then a trip to Legoland on Sunday. It was EXHAUSTING. Fun, and he loved it so much, but I was dead Sunday night. I think I'm still recovering. 

On that note, I'm really trying to get to bed earlier this week. In theory, it's such an easy thing to do to improve one's quality of life, and I can always feel a difference. On top of simply not getting to bed early enough and waking up at a god-awful time, I also sleep very poorly. According to my Fitbit I usually get an average of like six hours and ten minutes of sleep a night. Not good. My simple goal is to just increase my weekly average- even if just by a few minutes.

One of my biggest sources of anxiety is the threat of large home repairs, whether realistic ones or not. Lately I have really been trying to work on figuring out ways to help myself cope with some really large stressors in my life, and decided a HELOC (home equity line of credit) would really help in this area. Tomorrow the notary comes out and I'm thinking knowing I have a very large safety net in place will help ease some of my fears (now if only the other issues in my life could be taken care of this easily).

My students are reading Antigone and I'm always surprised with how much I have really grown to appreciate the story and teaching them about what happened to Oedipus' family prior to this play. I draw this really horrible family tree on the board that allows me to kill off people and slash out Oedipus' eyes and it's really just a lot of morbid fun. I haven't read Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus in decades, so I'm actually *gasp* considering reading them again.

I don't really watch movies, and I definitely don't rewatch them often, but lately I've been wanting to revisit some of my old favorites like Jerry Maguire, Dirty Dancing, Clueless, etc... A simpler time, that's for sure...