Vacation All I Ever Wanted

Last week, around Thursday, I decided "You know what? I want a vacation. I have paid days off. I'm taking a vacation before Hubby goes back to classes." So next week, I'm taking the whole thing off. We're going to visit my Mom this weekend, then we're going to see his parents, and the last 5 days are going to be spent crashing on the couch, reading, writing, and playing video games. I'll do some baking, make some new recipes...but I'm mainly looking forward to marking a few of my "travel" tasks off. You see, with a little research, I learned that my mom lives about an hour away from the Linville Caverns, NC's only tourable cavern (#6), and I know that my in-laws aren't all too far from the NC Zoo (#1). So that's the plan. Sunday or Monday, cave walk, Tuesday or Wednesday, Zoo. Wednesday evening, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, CRASH! I'm so looking forward to it. Next week, I'm gonna get as much done for my list as I possibly can in one week. Expect a big update at some point.

I read book #29 last night. Sis-in-law K sent me Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver over the Kindle. It's not my usual kind of book, and I had some loves and hates with it. It focuses on the stories of 3 people living in or around a small farming town in the mountains of Virginia: a forest ranger living on her own studying the predator population, a young newlywed city girl with her farmer husband, and an old man who hates his neighbor and her organic growing. I liked some of the educational aspects of the book. I learned a few things about predation, moths, and organic growing I hadn't known before. I liked the young woman's story, and I liked the old man's story. They both grew as characters over the summer the book covered. The forest ranger, however, I found bland. She didn't change over the book, her story didn't really GO anywhere aside from a "plot twist" that you could see from the beginning of the book, and she just...she had no personality. She was there simply to explain some things related to the other characters in story. You could have removed her entire storyline and nothing would have been lost, I think. I also felt that the author was a little too heavy-handed with "women are right, men are wrong, women are smart and educated and men only want sex". I also felt her arguments between the old man and his neighbor were too much of how people WANT arguments to go but they never do. They didn't feel genuine. I have to admit, it was kinda refreshing to read fiction other than fantasy, but I can't wait to get back to my worlds of dragons and magic.