Yellow Wallpaper

This past week flew by for me; I think it was the Monday holiday that messed with my mind. We spent the day at home; it was cold and there was snow in the forecast and I didn't feel like going anywhere. We made some chocolate chip cookies and didn't do much else. When I look back on the rest of the week it feels like a blur. Tuesday evening I had a meeting to go to at school and then a Relief Society activity. I worked on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, and then all day on Saturday. When I think about the week I generally feel like things went well, but trying to remember any details is difficult. I've been planning to make Little Dude a scripture bag for a while and I even bought the fabric a few weeks ago. Last night I finally got over my inertia and decided to do it. Things went well for the first part of the project, but when it came time to make the straps I ran into major problems. I had bought quilted fabric to make the bag because I thought it would make it sturdi...

Apparently I have abandoned thoughtful, well-written posts in favor of random, scattered updates on my life. I have neglected writing this week because I have been disciplined about getting myself to bed on time. It feels good to get up early and get my day off to a good start, and it feels even better to do that after a decent night's sleep. There also hasn't been much to say this week, plus I have five more books that I need to read for a deadline at the end of the month so I've been focusing on that. As I mentioned, I've generally done well with getting myself to bed and getting up on time. This was the first week of class, and it is going well so far. Every semester seems to get easier and I am enjoying teaching. I have also had a very stable class roster this time around too, so that always helps. My schedule has given me more free time since I am now around when Little Dude is at school in the afternoon and P.Bibby is napping. It's been great; so has being ho...

This week was nice because the kids went back to school but I didn't have to start teaching yet. It felt good to have a little break and relax a little. I rented the first season of the TV show The Closer from the library and spent a lot of my free time this week watching it. I also cooked a lot, including homemade bread and enchilada sauce from scratch. I start teaching again tomorrow and I'm not really looking forward to it. I only ended up with one class this semester--which is partly the department's fault for not reading my request form correctly and partly mine for not having a more flexible schedule. I think it feels particularly onerous because it is a class that meets three times a week for fifty minutes. So three mornings a week I get to get up, drive to campus, teach for an hour, and drive home. However, I did the financial calculations and I just can't do without the money right now. At least I only live about 10 minutes from campus; if I lived farther away...

This year I read 95 books, which is just a few more than last year . You would think that with having three kids and working two jobs I wouldn't have time to read, but as I talked about in this post , it's a bit of a compulsion. Plus I'm in a book club, I work in a library, and I have other things that need to read books for. We'll see if I really do read fewer books in 2012. 60 were fiction and 35 were nonfiction; that seems to be pretty similar to the ratio I've had every year since I started keeping track of things. I like nonfiction a lot, but fiction books are often faster and easier to read. This year 62 books were by women and only 33 were by men. I don't know if that means anything at all; there were a few authors that I read more than once this year and most of them were women. I also read a lot more books by LDS authors this year, but among those there didn't seem to be more women than men. Once again, here are my favorites for the year (in no part...

The Pharaoh's Daughter by N.C. Allen This was a fun historical mystery that made for a nice read while waiting for my car to get a new battery installed. I felt like there were a few too many characters and I sometimes had trouble keeping everyone straight, but that was the main flaw that I found. The Art Detective by Philip Mould I learned a few things about art history and restoration from this book, but generally I felt like the author was pretentious and not very good at explaining things clearly. The Call by Yannick Murphy The narrative voice of this book is very distinct and I had a hard time really getting into it at first. I'm glad that I persevered because it ended up being one of the best books I've read all year. American Widow by Alissa Torres I had to read a graphic novel this month for work so I chose this one. Technically it's a graphic memoir, and I thought it was really well done. The story has the potential to be horribly maudlin, but the spare wri...