Riffday: expressing multiple attitudes simultaneously

1.  PellMel and I went to Bozeman last weekend to find her an apartment.  Success!  Everything is so much cheaper than it was when she was renting in Seattle that really, it felt like everything we saw was awesome.  We had a great time, but it was many-mucho hours in the car.  My butt hurts.  Ever the audiobook fans, we listened to Divergent by Veronica Roth.  It made the time go by but it seemed so derivative--how many YA books now have started with some kind of sorting/choosing ceremony?  The Hunger Games, City of Ember, The Giver, even Harry Potter.  It just seemed like a re-hash of all the post-apocalyptic novels out there.  PellMel liked it better than I did, though, so maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

2.  So, when I went in to talk to the Continuing Ed people about teaching non-credit classes, they asked me if I would be interested in teaching "senior seminars," which are courses that meet weekly for three weeks about topics (presumably) of interest to senior citizens.  I said Sure!! and then they e-mailed me a few days later and asked if I would teach Native American Montana literature. *pause* ummm... okaaay.... I guess?  So I did what I always do when faced with something I need to learn fast, which is start googling and then read like a madwoman.  I went to the library yesterday afternoon and came home with a two-foot high stack of books.  I suspect I will be reading Native American lit all summer.  I have to get a course outline to them by the end of next week, puh-leez let me know if you have any advice.  Since they also approved the two courses I proposed before, I'm on tap to teach three entirely different topics in the space of about two and a half months in the fall.  Yikes.  It never rains but it pours.

3.  I never did a May reading report, did I?  Probably because I didn't read all that much.  The month started with that trip to D.C., in honor of which I read A Very Short Introduction to the Supreme Court (by Linda Greenhouse), which was actually pretty interesting and informative.  For some reason I've always been fascinated by the Supreme Court.  Etiquette and Espionage (Gail Carriger) was the book that broke my New Year's resolution to not buy any novels this year.  It was fun.  It's a young adult novel about a girl who thinks she's being sent away to finishing school but really it's a school for spies-in-training.  It's a terrific idea, but I found myself wishing she had spent more time fleshing out what was being taught at the school.  I suspect she was trying to avoid creating Hogwarts-for-spies (although she kind of did anyway)(not that I minded).  It's not the world's best writing, but if you want a fun book to read on vacation, it will fill the bill.  The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan.  I enjoyed The Lightning Thief and its sequels, and Lost Hero is the start of a new series set in the same world.  It started out well, but in the end it was disappointing.  Riordan sadly seems to have joined the ranks of the write-a-book-every-six-months crowd-- Lost Hero felt really boilerplate.  It had a few good moments, but it didn't interest me enough to convince me to move on to the sequel.  It occurred to me that it read more like an outline for a movie than an actual novel.  You don't need a beautifully written book if you can make a multi-million dollar movie deal and then let the movie makers do your work for you.  I'm completely positive that I read more books than that during the month of May but I can't think of a single other thing at the moment other than re-reads.

4.  The chickens are back to laying 5-6 eggs per day again.  I'm considering going over to the the mall and leaving eggs in any car with the windows open.

5.  We finally made it to see Star Trek: Into Darkness this week.  I loved it.  It way exceeded my expectations.  We made the kids sit through Wrath of Khan and "The Menagerie" parts 1 & 2 a couple of weeks ago (and also "The City at the Edge of Forever" which is my favorite original series episode), and we may have a couple of nascent Star Trek fanatics on our hands.  Not that we mind.  We can spend all next winter watching ST reruns.

6.  Have I ever told you that I have a Superman thing?  More about that another time, maybe.  I'm half-dreading, half-anticipating the new Superman movie that comes out this weekend.  We'll see.

7.  I adapted the post I wrote about joy a couple of weeks ago and it is up at the WEBS blog today.  I cleaned it up a bit and added a couple of thoughts, check it out if you have time!  Have a great weekend!