Hello hello! This’ll be my last post for January, and I can’t believe the first month of 2021 is already over! It went by so fast. I’m super proud of myself for keeping this going, and I have a lot of exciting plans for myself that I can’t wait to share with you guys. This week is more lowkey than others have been. I wanted to take this time to talk about a book I just finished. 

So this week I finally finished reading Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Macguire, and I’ll get to why I say finally in a second. But this book, which is actually part of a series, takes place in Oz and follows the story of Elphaba a.k.a the Wicked Witch of the West. This book is the inspiration for the broadway musical with the same namesake, Wicked. I absolutely adore everything about the musical, especially the music. I had the opportunity to see the show on Broadway almost ten years ago. Now, I added the finally into my sentence when I said I finished reading it because I could not tell you how long ago I got this book. I’ve had it for a decent number of years and in that time have tried reading on many different occasions but I just could not get into it. It had been sitting on my shelf collecting dust until I decided to grab it for my plane ride back to Washington the other day. Unfortunately, I don’t really have much to say about this novel. I think I was looking for something to give me a taste of the musical again and an opportunity to reminisce. The story in the book itself has a lot more politics and philosophy than I can recall (granted I was like 13). I feel like a lot of it went over my head and I missed some of the points the author was trying to make. All and all I did enjoy jumping back into the world of Oz. If I were to reread the book, it would probably be in ten years in an attempt to understand more of the themes in the story.

I’m feeling super optimistic going into the second month of 2021. I have pretty much stayed on track with my various resolutions. Overall I am feeling healthy, both physically and mentally, and I have the motivation to keep it up.  Also, check out this tree!! I shot this for Melissa. She needed a RAW image for one of her classes and on one of my walks, this caught my eye. I think it is super neat how the sign has fused a bit with the tree. I wonder what it’ll look like decades from now.  

I hope you have a wonderful day, and Happy February!