7ToF: my kid likes pride and prejudice

1. My eighteen-year-old would rather ski or hunt or play golf or stick needles under his fingernails than read these days, although he enjoyed reading when he was younger. But Jane Austen has won him over. He's reading P&P for AP English and he sheepishly confessed at dinner last night that he kind of likes it. Mic drop.

2. Politics. LA LA LA LA LA *fingers in my ears*

3. So everybody knows that mom jeans are totally lame (even though we all wore them back in the 80s before we had kids, so they weren't mom jeans then). Nobody wears them anymore. They're embarrassing. Except you know what? I bought a pair by accident about a month ago (bought them online, didn't read the description very carefully) and omg I had forgotten what comfortable jeans feel like. They are awesome. I've never worn low-rise jeans, because hello two pregnancies and menopause, but I had made the switch to mid-rise. Not anymore. I have returned to my roots. 

4. I re-read A River Runs Through It this week as background for my Montana Short Stories class. It's too long to read as one of our stories, but it's the gold standard for Montana literature, so I thought it would be good to have it fresh in my mind. It was both better and worse than I remembered from the last time I read it a dozen years ago. I remembered it as more of a fable or a morality tale than anything else, with not much to say beyond setting up the metaphor of fishing and life. But it is more than that: the love of a wayward brother you cannot save, the mix of honorable and dishonorable traits in the same young man, the play of  the narrator's life, lived within the lines, against his borther's wreckless life, inevitably gone too soon. And of course there are some breathtakingly lovely descriptions of rivers and fishing. But it has the annoying problem (shared by Guthrie's The Big Sky, Montana's other literary claim to fame) of a view of women that is so dated as to be almost unreadable. The old dichotomy between the angel in the home and the whore at the bar is blatant. Still, definitely worth reading.

5. Over the winter, our seven chickens were averaging two eggs a day, which is about perfect for the amount of eggs we eat. Then several days this past week there were five eggs. Maybe because the days are longer? (although not much longer, sunset was at 5:40 today.) Who knows. They're tough little things. There's still quite a bit of snow on the ground and they get out and scratch around in it every day.

6. We watched way too much Big Bang Theory a few years ago and got heartily sick of it. We didn't watch it for about a year and a half. But we've been catching up on the episodes we missed over the past few weeks, and they really do have an amazing team of writers. They've done some pretty creative stuff to keep it interesting. If they would just ditch the laugh track it might be my favorite sitcom ever. We've also been watching lots of movies (see previous statement about sunset at 5:40). Most of them were just a way to pass an evening, but if you haven't seen Once, it's really good. Kind of slowly paced, character-driven, with lots of music. 

7. Weight Watchers update: still doing it. Still slowly losing weight. I may not adore it like some do but it's working, so I'm not complaining.

Have a great weekend.