I wasn’t able to write much this week, because we came back from a trip to Los Angeles, and then things have been busy. This week I went to a retirement party for two of my former co-workers, and it was wonderful to catch up with good friends. School is great, I’m getting to know my students a little better every day, and some are getting more comfortable with me. Today we finished the week with a Homecoming Pep Rally, outside in the football field. It’s the sort of thing I have absolutely no memory of doing when I was in high school – and if I did go to pep rallies, I doubt I enjoyed them.
In LA, we had a really nice time with my in-laws. We also saw a LOT in a week, including a couple of bucket list items. For me, a Hollywood studio tour (Warner Brothers), where we saw exterior sets for shows and movies. I was most excited to see where the opening of Abbott Elementary is filmed, but the most popular stuff was from Friends and Gilmore Girls. We got to go inside one sound studio, for the show The Pitt, which I don’t watch, but I was impressed by how detailed and realistic the set was. Every poster on the walls was something you’d see in an actual hospital, and all the equipment looked real. Even vending machines with handwritten post-it notes on them (“call __ if you need a refund”).
Mr. CG’s bucket list item was a tour of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a NASA facility near Pasadena that builds remote drones and Rovers that get sent to the planets in our solar system (Mars in particular). I’m helping in a Biology class at school, and it was fascinating to see how scientists are searching for signs of life on other planets. We saw the room where all this data gets collected and transmitted, and we even got to see something being built that will be launched in the next year or two.
We visited three bookish places. In the Huntington Library and Gardens, we saw some beautiful 15th Century editions of the Canterbury Tales. The Huntington also maintains a collection of local author Octavia Butler’s papers. Butler is the writer of classic science fiction like Parable of the Sower, Kindred, Blood Child, and The Dawn Trilogy. However, her collection wasn’t on display due to a lengthy renovation of the building. I was referred instead to a local bookstore created in her name: Octavia’s Bookshelf. This small store is woman-owned and features Black authors. You can find it on Bookshop.org here. I bought a book on journaling that had been recommended in my writing class, The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad. The third place was the Skirball Center, a Jewish museum that had an extensive exhibit of the comic book work of Jack Kirby (Captain America, Fantastic Four, X-Men, among others). This museum also had an excellent permanent exhibit on Jewish Life from Antiquity to America.
We also saw a NWSL soccer game (Angel City vs. Washington Spirit), drove a “Duffy Boat” around Balboa island, and tasted wine in Los Olivos, a small town a couple hours north of LA in the Santa Ynes Valley. More importantly, we saw good friends who nearly lost their home in Altadena earlier this year.
As I’m thinking about free-writing, I mean to cover more serious topics, but haven’t had much time to focus on those yet. I look forward to sharing those with you! I’m also way behind on writing and posting ARC reviews, posting this month’s Reading Wrap-Up, and I’ll be volunteering a lot in the next month for my library’s used book sale. Honestly, it feels good to be busy again.
Thanks for following me on my journey.
