Bookish (and not so Bookish) Thoughts

A teacher on our campus has started running, so I’ve hooked her into running memoirs and it’s been so fun to pick ones out for her. I have a new one on ultra-running which I’m saving to read right before my half marathon, when I’m tapering and needing some motivation.

I’m watching the docu-series Cheer on Netflix while I run and it’s so good. I was never a cheerleader, but I have always had respect for the competitive teams, especially. The backstories on the kids often move me to tears (which is hard when running…) and I can’t wait to see how the team they’re focusing on does at Nationals. I have never been able to watch things while I run, so I’m hoping I’ve found a genre that works.

I have been considering letting my Audible account go into a suspension, just because I have been primarily listening to Podcasts lately. But, on the other hand, I was also thinking I could use my overflow credits to purchase the Harry Potter books, since I’ve started reading them with Sawyer and I could see them being fun for him to listen to in the car after we’ve read them together someday.

For outside reading my students have to read 800 extra pages of literature (fiction or nonfiction) a semester. I always require one of the books to be of a certain genre; this semester it will be either a collection of short stories or essays. The collective groan when I say “collection of essays” was comical. Challenge accepted: I can’t wait to bring in some samples to change their minds. They’re so used to their own essays and ones that are a little duller that they read for AP Lang before my class that they are definitely biased.

Last Friday we had a pipe start leaking in our living room ceiling. It was pretty stressful, but we lucked out, had some great referrals, and everything is back to normal. Now I just get to panic about every little noise I hear now (Drip? Creak? Kid? Imagination?) and wait for the next thing to go wrong (which actually technically has already happened, since we realized our sprinklers aren’t working, although outside things don’t cause me as much stress).

Tomorrow we are finishing up our sixteenth, and final, Sylvia Plath poem and I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER. I respect her writing immensely, think studying poetry is important, and even enjoy a few of her poems, but I am incredibly tired of teaching this. Give me novels any day.

Things have been a little quiet schedule-wise lately, but things are pretty busy this weekend- dinner with a friend, a playdate, and hopefully something outside on Monday (hiking or walking around the beach or something). My mood needs a bit of a boost, so I think some social time out of the house will be super helpful.