And just like that, the year is halfway over! I’ve been glad for the dramatic slowdown of my work obligations…I took on significantly more responsibility in this past session, which was my third, which was rewarding but also exhausting. Since we adjourned at the end of the day on June 5, my life has been much more boring but that is 100% fine by me.
In Life…
- Like I noted above, legislative session is over! Which is always a mixed bag…as much as it means very long days and high stress levels, I do love the community of session. I get to see more of our Las Vegas-based team, who I really enjoy getting to spend time with, and I get to reconnect with my session friends that live outside of Reno, who I miss when it’s all over. But it’s been a long 120 days and I am ready to take it a little easier for a while.
- We celebrated our first wedding anniversary! It fell on Father’s Day, so we didn’t really do anything special besides dinner the night before and then had a Father’s Day dinner with my in-laws and friends, but my husband is my favorite person to just hang out with so I was perfectly happy. Our cake topper was surprisingly decent after a year in the freezer, and we got a sweet ice cream cake from my in-laws just in case the topper had gone bad.
- I went to my first rodeo! My husband’s company does a box at the annual Reno Rodeo, so I got to experience my first official cowboy event. I enjoyed what I got to see…but that was only about 45 minutes worth, because I turned out to be deeply and profoundly allergic to the rodeo. I want to go back sometime, but with Claritin onboard.
- Mrs. Dalloway: This was my first-ever Virginia Woolf, and I really enjoyed reading it. It took me nearly a week even though it’s less than 200 pages because the text was so dense, but it was a rich and rewarding experience.
- In The Skin of a Lion: I felt about this book club pick much like I felt about Michael Ondaatje’s more famous The English Patient– it was very beautiful and I could not connect with it at all.
- The Man Without A Face: A recounting from an actual Russian journalist of the rise and power consolidation of Vladimir Putin seemed very timely. There’s necessarily a lot of speculation because no one would confirm on the record the kinds of things that are going on, but it’s informed speculation and this is a book well worth reading.
- Shattered: Journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes had been working on a book that they expected to be about how Hillary Clinton was elected as the first female president, and then when things went the other way, wrote this book about how the campaign played out from the inside. I know a lot of people who worked on the Hillary campaign and so I take some of this with a grain of salt, but it was definitely an interesting read.
- Spoiled: After two serious, information-heavy non-fiction books in a row, this frothy YA novel hit the spot perfectly. From the bloggers behind Go Fug Yourself, a longtime favorite of mine, this book was kind of like a Twinkie: light, tasty, and insubstantial.
- The Year of Living Biblically: This memoir from a secular Jewish man who decides to spend a year living according to the many (700+!) rules of the Old and New Testaments is amusing and fairly interesting, but not anything particularly special.
- Spook: This was my first Mary Roach, and if her style is dry, sardonic humor combined with genuine curiosity, sign me up for literally all of the rest of them. This book, in particular, featured her traveling around to try to look at one of the most persistent questions of humankind…is there life after death? I definitely enjoyed reading this.
In our just-finished session, Nevada’s legislature was 40% women: one of the highest proportions in the country! So why don’t more women in the country at large run for office? This piece from Politico looks at this very question, noting that although there’s not much of a gender gap in political aspirations in high school, there starts to be one in college when ambitious men are encouraged to run someday, while women don’t get that kind of feedback. As a woman working in politics (I’ll admit here I’m part of the problem in that I have zero interest in running), I’d love to see Nevada’s legislature make it to gender equality…and the rest of the country catch up!
