All is well

I had a break. I went through three beautiful National Parks (Zion, Bryce and the Grand Canyon) with my favorite person, escaping both work and the depressing Chicago winter-that-never-ended for a whole week, and now I’m back. And I feel much better for it. Chicago is my favorite city in the world but it was lovely to be immersed in natural beauty for a while. A couple of times on the trip I started either laughing or tearing up because of how crazily beautiful the landscape was–all red rocks going up forever and bizarre formations and stripe-y colors…

Hopefully the feeling of being reset lasts for a while.

Writing notes:

I was super lazy for most of the trip but then on the last two days I started working a bit and then I spent most of my time in the airport and in the air on the way back typing away. It was a little horrible to read over some of the pages that I had printed out and see how rough they were because it was all so much cleaner and better in my head but I think I am making progress. My goal is to have 100 decent pages to give in for my class in early May.

Reading notes:

I read two books on vacation: Frances & Bernard and The One I Left Behind. Frances & Bernard is all in letters and I found it rather lovely—I was charmed by it and I thought the ending, while sad, was pretty spot on. The One I Left Behind was fun and fast and very good plane reading. Also, it was a good lesson in plot holes not mattering terribly much if the pacing is fast enough.