An after school walk
Sorting the letters.
KRPS schedule in 1994
Requiem: dresses.
Postcard from Virgina
Exercise goal for April.
I get a goodly amount of exercise, but I would like to do better. My goal for April will be to average 60 minutes of exercise over six days. I’ve just tallied up my exercise for the 12 weeks since January 6, and I averaged 45 minutes per day. So I have a good foundation built. Exercise can be anything but will most likely be the following things I do: walking, jog/walk, Pilates, exercise class. The only thing I’m not counting is restorative yoga, which I love, and is very good for me, but I cannot in good conscious call exercise. I don’t have to complete 60 minutes all at once, can break the sessions and scatter them through the day.
I’ll check in at the end of every week.
Week of March 31
I did 370 minutes of exercise over seven days, but since I’ve decided to divide 370 by six and not seven, I made my goal.
Week of April 7
380 minutes over six days. Goal achieved! Also, I walked home from work for the first time. It took 85 minutes. Which is not really that long, in the grand scheme of things. I might think about doing this more often.
Week of April 14
365 over six days. I took Easter off.
Week of April 21
Despite the fact I did no exercise on three days, I still clocked 360 minutes this week. This makes me think that 360/week is a reasonable number to shoot for on a regular basis.
Week of April 28
Although this week I only did 165 minutes over four days. I did run a 5k on Saturday though, which meant I skipped my walk to the gym and the gym which meant 80 minutes of usually automatic exercise I did not obtain. Not such a great finish to the experiment, but still successful enough that I will continue to strive for 360 minutes of exercise per week.
Books read in April 2014
Good stuff this month. Except for one YA that I felt very ambivalent about, the rest of these books were ones I would shove at you with varying levels of excitement. If I had to pick just one, I would tell you to read This Song Will Save Your Life which hit every single teenage-girls-are-awesome buttons. I’m mildly obsessed with Leila Sales, the author.
Picture books
The Scraps Book
Lois Ehlert
Read for Librarian Book Group.
Book about the author’s process in making her books. Full of fun detail.
Middle Readers
The Crossover
Kwame Alexander
Poetry! And Basketball! A tale of a middle school basketball star with a twin brother (who also plays) a dad who is a former pro-ball (in Europe) player and a mom who is the principal of the middle school. The story unfolds in many short poems. Very excellent.
Young Adult Books
Grasshopper Jungle
Andrew Smith
Read for Librarian Book Group.
For the first half of this book I was completely in love with the horny stylings of the narrarator. The Iowa town was great, the friend/girlfriend were great, the love triangle was fabulous and I loved the descriptions of the school and teachers. It was also funny on every single page. But somewhere in the middle I suddenly didn’t love it as much and by the end I was just at a simple “like” which was too bad because it was headed toward five-star status. But you should read it if you like gonzo plots, adolescent boys being very frank about sexual desire, adolescent boys who are trying to figure out their feelings–possibly romantic–for their best friend*, sci-fi stylings, or books about small town Iowa. Also if you like funny.
Overall, I recommend. Maybe because I read it so fast I lost interest? I can’t put my finger on what happened.
*This angle right here was enough for me to read the book. Boys thinking they might be attracted to other boys, but still love girls isn’t something I see a lot of.
The Theory of Everything
Kari Luna
This won the Oregon Book Award for YA and I can’t say I loved it. Was she hallucinating or was she experiencing breaks in the fabric of the universe? It wasn’t super clear to me and I felt uncomfortable.
This Song Will Save Your Life
Leila Sales
My favorite kind of tale: girl finds her “thing,” boy is superfluous. It reminded me a lot of the movie Whip-It in all the best ways. This is a fun read and will resonate with anyone who has felt out of place in school, but at home when music is playing.
Grownup Books
Lessons from the Borderlands
Bette Lynch Hustead
Read for Kenton Library Book Group.
Essays written by a woman living in Eastern Oregon, who grew up poor in Idaho. There were things I could relate to, which makes for good essay reading.
Story of a Marriage
Andrew Sean Greer
Beautifully written tale from the perspective of a woman living in San Francisco in the 1950s. There were a couple of surprising turns I didn’t see coming.
This is Between Us
Kevin Sampsill
Reading this I couldn’t help but think repeatedly, “Is this how guys think?” Because if it is, I have vastly underestimated the amount of time they are thinking about sex. And that’s with studies being published telling me they think of sex every six minutes or so. This book is a tale of a five years of a couple’s life. A lot of sex. A lot of thinking about sex. I found it rather hot, though weird that the guy who wrote it is the guy who introduces the authors for readings at Powell’s.