Woman at Work

I really don’t travel much and most of the places I do go are because of some sort of sports event or camp for my son. This last year has been surprisingly full of travel adventures that haven’t had anything at all to do with my kid. I’ve had fun, but boy did I pay for it this last week.

I’m not staring down the barrel of any imminent deadlines, but in the past couple of months I’ve missed a number of my self-imposed smaller deadlines; you know, the things you should stick to or your big deadlines get ugly and impossible. After returning home from D.C. I told myself that I had to get caught up, get back to my planned calendar. I’ve spent the last seven days attempting to do just that. I’m not there quite yet, but the edge of panic has worn off a little. However, it looks like I’ll be spending my summer either missing the nicer weather or hauling my laptop to the backyard. Hope your summer (I'm calling the end of the school year the official start of summer) is off to a wonderful all-deadlines-met start.


Books
I did read a book on the planes to and from D.C. that I really enjoyed. FLAT-OUT LOVE by Jessica Park is a digital book only (uh, I don’t think I’m wrong about that, but there might be a paperback version in the future). I thought I would do some work on the plane rides but it just wasn’t happening. Instead, I chose to read, hoping to find something that would make the narrow seat and the elbow in my side from the neighboring passenger not so horrible. I got lucky.

FOL is a young adult novel; a genre which I’ve been reading a bunch of lately and have found they can either be really, really good or torturous. FOL is in the really, really good category.

The main character is a young adult but not as young as some. She’s a college freshman. I think this age isn’t written about enough - or I’ve missed these books, which is possible.

Anyway, I don’t know Jessica personally but we are Facebook friends and I think she’s hysterically funny. I bought this book fully expecting to like it, but I was surprised at how much I liked it. I knew she’d be good at the funny stuff, but she's also good with the serious and heart-wrenching stuff. It's got romance, mystery, laughs, family dysfunction. It’s all really well done, and it made my plane rides fly (grin) right on by.