Weekly Round Up: Back to School Edition

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  This week we had possibly the Best Ever first week of school, I went on a nacho spree for lunch, saw an epic movie with the fam, went on a Little House podcast binge, and shored up my plan for Operation Endgame.

Back to School (Stepkid Bragz)

If the first week is any indication, we're going to have an epic school year.  Stepson #1 has taken to college like a duck to water.  Stepson #2 is in a career prep program at high school, which means that he gets to take engineering classes for the first half of his school day.  Man, back in my day high school and the first year of college were just the same old classes all over again but kids these days actually get to mix it up and do stuff that they might use IRL.

Eats

Nothing much is going on.  I've been eating nachos for lunch on repeat: a base of tortillas, a few dabs of refried beans, cheese, salsa, sour cream and of course green onions.

Workouts

More of the same, which is currently the Beginners series in the CGX app plus a collection of "I made it up myself" run/walk finishers.  I hope you're sitting down when I tell you this, but my longest running intervals have gotten up to HALF A MILE.  I don't have a plan for what I'm doing with all this, I'm just mentioning it.

Watching

I started watching the TV version of The Handmaid's Tale back in June right after I read the book.  I haven't been watching very much TV so it's taken me this long to finish episode four and...I think that's a far as I'm going with it.  I stand by what I said before that the acting is excellent, and I think that if I hadn't read the book I might keep watching.  The problem is that the book is on the shorter side and very sleekly and efficiently written.  A TV show that's six seasons and counting...they've had to bloat up the story so much already that I can't stand it.

In happier news, stepson #2 came across some memes from Pulp Fiction and the next thing you know, we're sitting down to watch the movie on Friday.  This is the second time that I've seen it, and the first time was with the hubs 10 years ago early in our relationship.  Stepson #1 came home toward the end of the movie and was so confused, because it's definitely not something that you can walk in on the middle of and pick up what's going on.

Afterwards it took all three of us to recap the story in chronological order and figure out the time span (at least two days).  It was a fun puzzle to work out.  From there we got sidetracked to Youtube videos on MacGuffins, so I think we may be heading back to Alfred Hitchcock territory for family movie viewing.

Reads

I'm still reading and still enjoying The Maltese Falcon but that's not what I want to talk about right now.  Thanks to HI NICOLE I am deep down in a Little House rabbit hole.  Nicole brought to the blogsphere's attention that there is a podcast about the Little House books called Wilder and I couldn't download it fast enough.

My status with the Little House books is duh of course I've read them - both as a child and as an adult and I still own my childhood copies.  Wait, you don't know me so I better back that statement up.

How I feel about the books is "it's complicated".  Yes I loved them or I wouldn't have read them so many times, but also the books made me feel a strong sense of guilt as a young 'un for all of the things that I had that Laura didn't have.  In later years I read Ghost in the Little House (the book that claimed that Rose Wilder Lane ghostwrote all of the Little House books) and I've heard the talk about the political agenda that she wove into the books.  My opinion from what I know so far is: ghostwriter - no, weird politics - of course.

You can say what you want about RWL but two of her novels are high on my list of all time favorites.  Diverging Roads was published in 1919.  A small town girl bootstraps her way up from nothing to becoming a telegraph operator, marries a no-goodnik, gets dumped, rebootstraps in real estate, and then becomes a journalist as one does.  It's been a while since I've read it and it's hard to find, but I remember that it was a page turning adventure.

Next up is a book that I only know about because I found it at a library book sale many years ago.  Let the Hurricane Roar is about a young pioneer couple named Charles and Caroline and their first year of marriage.  It's a very short book, but the writing is so good and the story is razor tight.  As the podcast explains, the backstory on how the book came to be is...it's weird but it doesn't tarnish my memories of all of the winter nights when I bundled into bed and read about the seven day blizzard in the dugout.  It really is LH for adults.

On thing that made me say hm is when the podcast deals with the racism in the books (my opinion on that is hi 1930's, we see you), and someone who was interviewed said "this shouldn't be taught in schools".  My question is: are the Little House books being taught in schools????  And if so in what grade???  "Back in my day" we read Little House because we were obsessed with it, not because it was a school assignment.  Related question, now that it's not the 1970s and the TV show is long gone, are kids still reading these books?

So anyways I'm gobbling down the podcast like a mad woman.  I'm at the point where they're about to get into the political stuff.

Operation Endgame Update

(the thing where I've decided to quit my job and possibly not go back to work) 

So after going back and forth another billion times the current forecast is that unless I change my mind again, I plan to quit tomorrow.  Why tomorrow?  Because that's when my boss scheduled my performance review.

Since we last talked:

• The idea of not working continues to grow on me.
• I'm thinking of this as an experiment to see what happens to my net worth if I stop working for one year rather than a big dramatic "I am never working again".
  
• I've gotten more organized about where my money will come from once the paychecks stop.  Plan A was live off my savings account and then at some point take money out of mutual funds to top it off, which was giving me "bag lady" syndrome for some reason.  Instead I'll pull the dividends and capital gains out of the mutual funds and have them deposited in my savings account instead of reinvesting them.  That's about half of the money that I need each year, and it keeps any one part of my nest egg from being depleted.
  
• Health insurance is a risk, but again I'm filing this under the "it's just an experiment for one year to see what happens".  As long as the hubs is working, we've got his insurance.  If neither of us was working, insurance is reasonable through the ACA exchange.  Where it could get dicey is if we got into a situation where both of us were bringing in decent income but didn't have an employer's health plan to back us up.  In that situation ACA is ungodly expensive so we'd be looking at some high cost months until one of us nails down employer paid insurance again.
  

That's the scoop!  I'll update on the job sitch as soon as there is something to report and I get my head around it. 

What's your history with the Little House books and where do you stand on them now? Do you own any of the books?