Since I've enjoyed doing monthly wrap-ups for a couple of years now, and I have more free time this summer, I'm going to try out weekly wrap-ups. The format may change or I may stop if they get too repetitive. Let me know what you think!
What I'm Reading This Week
1. We refinanced our mortgage
I'd been meaning to do this since rates started going down with the pandemic and now that I am (unplanned) out of work for the summer, since my summer job didn't end up happening, and I'm not getting any bites on online summer jobs that are legit or worth the money (SmarThinking offers $11/hour for master's degrees, $12 for PhDs. No, I'm not joking). I did some research, and we ended up getting 3.373%, which is much better than our current 4.5%, so we're taking it. There are better rates out there, but because of our (my) current financial situation, they wouldn't offer them to us because of the debt-to-income ratio, and everyone said the situation is really volatile right now, so I decided to take what we can get. If you have a mortgage, I do really recommend refinancing now and shopping around. There seem to be a lot of good options and most of the mortgage loan officers I talked to seemed pretty conscientious and told me to take the best rate I could get anywhere; I even had at least one outright tell me to take someone else's rate.
2. We lost our dog in a closet
We had some fun yesterday when we couldn't find one of our dogs. I seriously wondered if he had escaped into a pocket dimension! We checked outside, every room in the house, calling his name, I even went around shaking a bag of treats--nothing. Finally, we thought we heard a noise, so I opened one of our closets (that my husband had already checked) and out he came! Just having a chill nap under the shoe rack, I guess.
3. I had a book club meeting on Dani Shapiro's Inheritance
One of my two book clubs met on Zoom this week to discuss Inheritance by Dani Shapiro. All of us (I think) really liked it, and I would be interested in reading her other memoirs and novels. She's a really lyrical, introspective writer, and as somebody put it, it's not just about her; her personal concerns about identity and belonging have universal themes. I thought Shapiro was really brave in confronting her unexpected genetic heritage and reckoning with what she felt as the loss or change of her Jewish identity--and it did change how she related to some members of her family and not others. She gained a new family as well, albeit with fraught ethical considerations.
What I'm Reading This Week
- I'm still reading Middlemarch by George Eliot. I'm a little more than halfway through. It's been a while since I read a nineteenth century novel, so it's a bit slow-going, but I'm loving it! It's got the omniscient, occasionally snarky narrator that I love from classic nineteenth century novels. While most of her characters are landed gentry like in Jane Austen novels, she's also got some characters in more precarious or lower class financial situations (ugh, trade!). There's also some discussion of agricultural labor reform that reminds me of Elizabeth Gaskell's focus on industrial labor reform, though at least so far, it's not as central. What I love the most about Eliot's writing is her brilliant extended metaphors, some of which read incredibly relevant today:
"Prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle--solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness."2. I've been reading and rereading some poetry as a comfort. I reread Mary Oliver's Blue Horses, which I own, twice. There's something so comforting in her writings, primarily about nature. I've also read a sample of her collection Devotions and read Blue Iris out of the library in the past. I wish I had more of her books. I'm also reading and rereading my former co-worker's poetry collection, My People, My People, My G-d, on his spiritual journey as a Black man in America. In addition to being a professor, he's also a minister.
What I Watched This Week
1. This week, my husband and I watched the documentary 13th on Netflix, about the broken and racist prison system in America. It wasn't my idea, as I'm not typically a huge fan of documentaries, but I foresee a lot more of them in my future. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, was interviewed prominently, and I definitely intend to read her book.
2. I also watched The Hate U Give, based on the book by Angie Thomas. It was streaming free on multiple platforms this week. I highly recommend it, even though it was hard to watch, because it so clearly shows the human toll of what is and has been happening to Black and other people as a result of police brutality in our country.
Other Things That Happened This Week1. This week, my husband and I watched the documentary 13th on Netflix, about the broken and racist prison system in America. It wasn't my idea, as I'm not typically a huge fan of documentaries, but I foresee a lot more of them in my future. Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, was interviewed prominently, and I definitely intend to read her book.2. I also watched The Hate U Give, based on the book by Angie Thomas. It was streaming free on multiple platforms this week. I highly recommend it, even though it was hard to watch, because it so clearly shows the human toll of what is and has been happening to Black and other people as a result of police brutality in our country.
1. We refinanced our mortgage
I'd been meaning to do this since rates started going down with the pandemic and now that I am (unplanned) out of work for the summer, since my summer job didn't end up happening, and I'm not getting any bites on online summer jobs that are legit or worth the money (SmarThinking offers $11/hour for master's degrees, $12 for PhDs. No, I'm not joking). I did some research, and we ended up getting 3.373%, which is much better than our current 4.5%, so we're taking it. There are better rates out there, but because of our (my) current financial situation, they wouldn't offer them to us because of the debt-to-income ratio, and everyone said the situation is really volatile right now, so I decided to take what we can get. If you have a mortgage, I do really recommend refinancing now and shopping around. There seem to be a lot of good options and most of the mortgage loan officers I talked to seemed pretty conscientious and told me to take the best rate I could get anywhere; I even had at least one outright tell me to take someone else's rate.
2. We lost our dog in a closet
We had some fun yesterday when we couldn't find one of our dogs. I seriously wondered if he had escaped into a pocket dimension! We checked outside, every room in the house, calling his name, I even went around shaking a bag of treats--nothing. Finally, we thought we heard a noise, so I opened one of our closets (that my husband had already checked) and out he came! Just having a chill nap under the shoe rack, I guess.
3. I had a book club meeting on Dani Shapiro's Inheritance
One of my two book clubs met on Zoom this week to discuss Inheritance by Dani Shapiro. All of us (I think) really liked it, and I would be interested in reading her other memoirs and novels. She's a really lyrical, introspective writer, and as somebody put it, it's not just about her; her personal concerns about identity and belonging have universal themes. I thought Shapiro was really brave in confronting her unexpected genetic heritage and reckoning with what she felt as the loss or change of her Jewish identity--and it did change how she related to some members of her family and not others. She gained a new family as well, albeit with fraught ethical considerations.
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