Friday Thoughts and Musings

It appears that fall has come early around here.  Yesterday I left the house wearing leggings, closed toed shoes, and a jacket.  Today I am wearing a sweater and jeans.  The weatherman said we have most likely had our last day of 90+ weather for the year.  I'm really not too happy about this.  I feel like I was gypped out of a summer.  I missed those hot sultry evenings and those hot, sticky mornings.  I missed going to baseball games.  I missed sitting outside and getting some sun.

But, secretly, I am a little excited about the clothes and the changing leaves.  I love wearing sweaters, scarves, and boots.  I love curling up in the den and reading away the afternoon and evening.  I love spending Saturdays lounging around while my parents watch college football, myself occasionally tuning in.  I made myself a nice mug of hot chocolate to sip on this morning while I was reading.  It was pretty nice, I must admit.

Now I am just hanging out, waiting for my dad to get home so we can go to a Monet exhibit.  I've been wanting to go to this exhibit ever since I found out it was in town.  Upon moving back home, I realized that the likelihood of getting a friend to go with me was pretty much slim to none, so I invited my dad.  To my happy surprise, he agreed to go with me.  Yay!  Monet is one of my favorites.  We went to an Impressionist exhibit a few years back in Dallas and I was super giddy to see Monet and Van Gogh (then some Picassos and Warhols, but they were in a different part of the museum).

Unsurprisingly, my reading plans have changed.  I haven't entirely abandoned hope of getting through the three books I named in my last post, but I'm just not sure that I am up to the task yet.  I had a long talk with a good friend yesterday about a reading dilemma I have been going through lately.  He faced a similar situation when he moved a few years ago.  You go from being around like-minded people who constantly feed and discuss your love of literature to being around people who don't quite share that love.  The transition back to reading solely for personal pleasure and not for discussion is kind of difficult.  Granted, this is the way we both were before going to college and becoming lit majors, but things are a bit different when you are taking lit classes.  So I'm working on getting back to reading solely for my personal pleasure.

My friend recommended rereading a few old favorites to get that spark going again.  I'm giving a recent release that I really want to read and enjoy another shot.  Then I'll probably start delving into my past for material.  Fortunately, I have a good feeling about this new release this go around, so hopefully I will be able to finish.  I know that Anna Karenina, which I am thinking about quite a bit at the moment, will be there waiting for me to reread when I am finished.

Speaking of old books, I have been purging books like crazy.  I have a rather impressive mountain of books to donate or sell.  Honestly, I kind of want to sell them to make some money because most of these books are unread.  Once I got all of my books under one roof, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books.  Even more so by the amount of un-read books.  They just kind of made me feel bad, which is completely not the point of having books to begin with!  Some of them are pretty cool...but are not ones I think I would ever read in this lifetime even if I lived to be two hundred years old.  So it is time we part ways.  But it totally works because it means that I now have shelf space for books I want to keep and read, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

The nice thing about purging is how it really kind of feeds on itself.  The more you get rid of, the more you want to get rid of.  Or at least, that's how it is for me.  I am jonesing to recycle all of the articles that I printed, but never read for two years worth of library school.  That will free up quite a bit of space.  There are old magazines that I'm not going to go back and read.  There are clothes I am never going to wear again.  There are all of those stupid little gadgets that people get you that you never asked for and most certainly will never use that are just wasting space until you finally crack and toss them all.  Stuff like that.  I can finally breathe again and that is a good thing.

In closing, I found this really awesome list of 15 Books to Fuel Your Inner Femme Fatale.  I don't know why this character has been on my mind lately, but I have been wanting to reread the books from this awesome crime fiction class I took as an undergrad.  Have fun!

Mille tendresse!