Ramblings of a Thirty-Something

 You know, my very first "list" post was from October of last year. It seems only appropriate to do one this October. We're halfway through the month. We've made it through the first quarter of this new way of teaching. I've survived the first eight weeks of my current grad school class {barely, but there's still time...this class might defeat me}. Harvest is finished. The weather has turned crisp.  Yep, a perfect time to craft a new list. My Current Books I am not reading them all at once. Two of them I have checked out from the library and really need to get around to reading them. Our October "Wines & Spines" {aka, my book club} pick was Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. I'd read it years and years ago, and it was a delight to re-read. If you haven't read it yet, do yourself a favor and pick it up. I have November's book in my stack, but I haven't started it yet:  Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay. I'm just getting enou...

October is the perfect time to read a good ghost story. I don’t mean a horror story, with homicidal maniacs or killer clowns {looking at you, Stephen King}. I’m talking about a ghost story—ancient houses, lonely spirits, unsuspecting guests. Perhaps, to be more accurate, I mean a good Gothic ghost story. I know what you’re thinking, and no, a Gothic tale does not have anything to do with those kids from high school who wore all black {although their look was originally inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s work}. It does have to do with Gothic architecture, as many of the stories from the height of the Gothic fiction period took place in homes built in the Gothic style. There is a very rich history of Gothic fiction, and it came to spawn some of the most prolific “spooky” authors of all time:  Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and of course, Edgar Allen Poe. And my girl, Jane Austen, wrote one of the most famous parodies of Gothic fiction ever:  Northanger Abbey . Her heroine, Catheri...

 Happy Fall, everybody!  The best season of the year has started. I was more  than ready for it this year {I mean, I'm ALWAYS  ready for fall, but this year, it has been greatly anticipated}.  Whether you also share my love of autumn or not {and if that's the case, how are we friends? 😉}, I don't think it is possible to get on any kind of social media site, whether it be Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram, and not  see at least one cutesy fall bucket list. I love looking at them, but my issue is usually they include things I don't much care about--or, in the case of 2020, things that aren't happening this year.  Since I love a good list, I've decide to create my own feasible fall bucket list. Some of these things are Halloween-centric, and some are just autumnal in nature.  Enjoy a fall-ish beverage!   Hot apple cider, pumpkin flavored coffee, spicy tea, mulled wine - any and all will be happening! When I was at Barnes and Noble the last time...

 This has been a hard week. Ask any teacher. For some of us, it has been the worst week we've had in education ever. No one has any answers to any questions. No one knows if what we are doing is right or wrong. No one is getting even close to the amount of support they need. I didn't even know what my students looked like  until we took an outdoor mask break. All I had seen were their eyes.  My post last week is still valid. I'm still excited that we are starting school in person. I'm still excited to meet my new students and get to know them. I'm still excited to see last year's kiddos in the hallway and get back to collaborating with my amazing teacher team and support staff. But damn, it's been a hard week. I could go on and on about the heartbreaking aspects of this week, but I don't know that I can emotionally afford to do that. So I'm going to use something that did happen in my classroom as a jumping off point.  My students were filling in the...

As I write this post, we are in the last days of July. August is almost upon us, and the dawn of that month brings a lot of questions to which no one--and I mean no one-- has satisfactory answers.  I have a general-ish, vague idea of what my job as a teacher is going to look like in a few weeks. I have a thousand questions, some of which I cannot even articulate yet.  So I'm not going to talk about teaching in this post. {Side note, that was always the plan for this post...it was never going to be about teaching, but I was currently feeling the introduction, so I went with it.} I'm going to talk about my other job. My new summer job. The job I am viewing as a stepping stone toward an eventual dream job. That's right:  my job as a library clerk. Libraries have been impacted by the pandemic and the shut-down just like every other business. We are just now getting ready to transition back to open doors. The closing of libraries has been unfortunate for many people across the...

We are 2/3 of the way through July. That means August is almost here. That means that school will be starting in less than a month. What that looks like for sure is still uncertain, as are most things right now, but hopefully we see some positive changes soon.  Since I did not post a list for June, I have decided to just post one list for the whole summer! It will be longer than usual, of course, because I have watched a lot of shows, read a lot of books, listened to a lot of podcasts...you get the idea. And because this will be a bit long, I'm not going to waste a lot of time on the introduction. My Current Books If you didn't know, I started working at the Onarga Public Library this summer. This has been both a blessing and a curse {don't worry, I have an entire post planned on just that topic}, but suffice it to say, I have been reading a lot more than normal. And I normally  read a whole-stinking-lot, so I'm going to highlight a couple of my favorites and then just ...

Hey, everyone! I’m coming back to my blog after a hiatus of about a month or so. There are a few reasons I took a break. Some fun family stuff was going on, and I wanted to focus on that. My brother and his wife had a lovely pandemic wedding at the end of May, and I am so excited for them as they begin this stage of their life together! Another reason is that I haven’t really been on Facebook much, which is where I post the link to my blog. I decided to delete the app in June to take a little break, and then the world shifted again. And in the midst of everything, my voice was and is not the voice that needed to be heard. There are other voices that deserved a chance to be heard—not that I think my voice overshadows those voice on a normal day. That would be stretching it just a bit. It just didn’t seem respectful, in my opinion, for me to be posting blog entries about the coffee I’m drinking or the books I’m reading when there are more important things people should be reading and e...

I have an ugly baby. Not a literal baby, friends. Calm down. Sorry if I spooked you. No, this ugly baby is not a living, breathing human. It's a book. Well, it's like the precursor to a book. It's a draft. An ugly, ugly, ugly draft. Let me back up a little bit. If you are a "regular" reader of my blog, you might recall back in November I said I was participating in something called National Novel Writing Month {or NaNoWriMo for short}. The goal of that project is to write 50,000 words in 30 days - or the first draft of a novel, essentially. I "won" NaNoWriMo, but I didn't finish the novel. I wrote all 50,000+ words, but the story just wasn't finished yet. So this April, I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo. Basically, that's just a shortened version, where you set your own word count goal for the month. And so I pushed through the month of April, and I finished my draft. It is done, and the beautiful thing {the only  beautiful thin...

I can't believe it's the first Wednesday in May. It feels like I just wrote my April list... Oh well, moving on! Maybe I will be able to write the June entry not from my house. I don't know where I'd go to do it...I'll just go to a random coffee shop simply to do it from somewhere else. My Current Books Right now, I'm rereading Anne of Green Gables . Such a good, wholesome, nostalgic read! And since I got the 1980s mini-series on DVD a few Christmases ago, I am definitely watching that when I'm done! Now I have done a lot of reading during the quarantine time, so while I'm not reading these right now, these are the books I have read in entirety during this time: North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell The Reluctant Warrior  by Mary Connealy Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate Sophia's War  by Avi Don't Overthink It  by Anne Bogel The Lost Lieutenant by Erica Vetsch Twisted Twenty-Six by Jan...