Days Off

• What with Patriot's Day and Easter this week, I had last Monday and Friday off, and I have this coming Monday off as well. Final projects for school are keeping me busy so I spent my time off doing work in my "mobile office" as Miss Sarah of Girls and Bicycles calls it.

AKA I went to the Dam Cafe. It's basically the only cafe in my whole town. I miss having the options of Rao's or Amherst Coffee or Cushman when I was doing my undergrad, but I like the atmosphere and they have really good lunch food if I don't feel like going home for lunch.

Monday looked like this:
Baseball game going on in the park.
Loving riding in the bike lane.
Obligatory panda shot.

And then here's Friday:
A stack of library books, a latte, my notebook and my favorite pen. I was incredibly productive. I'm also thrilled by the fact that not only can I get books from any public library in Western Massachusetts through interlibrary loan (I just requested Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Dream Country to join in the I Will If You Will book club at Monkey See), BUT I can also take out any book from Mt. Holyoke library since I'm a Simmons GSLIS West student, and from Amherst College and UMass libraries because I'm a resident of one of the counties adjacent to them. It's great! So I currently have 4 library cards and I have books checked out from 3 different libraries.

It was a little chilly on Friday, so here were my shoes of choice:

If you're wondering what I've been reading lately (aside from textbooks and articles about library research) the answer is The Mysteries of Udolpho, a gothic novel with suspense and the supernatural and castles and romance, which I liked but didn't love; The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar which I absolutely adored, go read it; My Best Friend is a Wookie, a memoir about being a diehard Star Wars fan which I couldn't get into because I am not a huge fan of Star Wars; and now I've just started The Toss of a Lemon by Padma Viswanathan which is about a Brahmin woman who is widowed in the early 1900s and challenges the rules about widowhood that existed at that time.

In college I took a course on South Asian women writers, which I loved, and I still really enjoy reading books about India and Pakistan and the like, so I'm sort of on a "fiction about Indian women" kick. I'll let you know how Toss of a Lemon turns out.

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I loved the way I could see the trees outside my window in the reflection of my tea. The color is long past now - I spent today trekking around a Disc Golf course covered in wet brown leaves for a tournament, and then we raked all the brown leaves off our lawn so that we can mow the lawn tomorrow. (FYI I am terrible at disc golf - my sister and I came in first in our division because we were the only ones in our division). As it gets colder I've been out on my bike less and less, mostly to my volunteer place and the YMCA.

One of my recent bike rides was to my parents' house for linner (too late to be lunch, too early to be dinner). It's about a 7.5 mile ride. The weather was great - I was actually too hot in the cardigan. Since I run I have a flourescent vest that lights up for night runs, so I packed that and attached it to my basket for the ride home since by that point it was getting dark.

I love my new boots! They are perfect for wearing over jeans or with sweater tights and they were great riding. Plus the chunkier heel makes for very comfortable walking.

The next pictures I post will involve coats, mittens and scarves I'm sure! Working up near the UMass campus I see a lot of college students biking and with the chill in the air there are a lot of kids biking around with their hoods up underneath their helmets. They look ridiculous but I bet they're warm!