It’s amazing how fast July flew by. We enjoyed a low-key 250th Independence Day with the family. The guys went camping for a few days while Mittu and I stayed at our respective homes and got things done. We celebrated Jason’s birthday and Timothy’s finishing the sixth grade as well as my blog’s 20th birthday–more on that in tomorrow’s Friday’s Fave Five!

Creating

I made two cards this month. The first was for Jason’s birthday:

I used a few things from a camping-themed scrapbooking packet and a few things from a forest creature themed packet. I was delighted to find this little frame in the latter packet–I had forgotten it was there. The chair and tent are 3-D layered stickers.

This was Timothy’s:

Watching

We rented Project Hail Mary from Amazon Prime Video when it’s rental price finally came down to a reasonable level. Its premise is that a middle school science teacher wakes up on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there and what he’s supposed to do. Slowly everything comes back to him and is shown to us in flashbacks. Some mysterious substance is destroying the sun, and he and two others were tasked with finding out what the problem is and what to do about it–only he finds the other two dead when he wakes up. He finds an alien investigating the same problem, and they team up. For such a dire situation, the movie has a sprinkling of humor and a surprising amount of heart. It’s implausible that one man, even a quiet genius, could figure out how to fly a spaceship (when he is not an astronaut), how to communicate with a previously unknown alien species, and how to fix the problem with the sun. But setting that aside, the story is quite enjoyable.

(BTW, don’t get this movie confused with The Last Hail M.A.R.Y., as my husband did. It’s the same premise of a dying sun, but it is truly awful in every way. In fact, if Mystery Science Theater, which lampooned bad movies, was still a thing, I’d nominate this film for them to cover.)

Little House on the Prairie is a new remake of the earlier Michael Landon series and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. This season had eight episodes on Netflix. I understand another season has been approved. It was just okay. Their are some variations from the original storyline, like the family’s close friendship, after a few rough starts, with a local Osage family which has a daughter the same age as Laura. Mary and Laura bicker sometimes in the books, but that seems to be taken up a notch here. One fun moment was recognizing Allison Arngrim, who played Nellie Oleson in the original series, as a scary drifter Mary and Laura run into when they get lost in the woods. There’s a conflation of the Osage and settlers’ religion which was not in either the series or the books. There were anachronistic phrases like “being the best version of ourselves” and “becoming who you were always meant to be.” But it was wholesome family viewing. A good article about the series is here.

We also watched Enola Holmes 3 on Netflix, the third movie based on a series of books about the much younger sister of Sherlock Holmes who solves cases in her own style. Enola was a teenager in the first two films but now is about to be married. But a crisis comes up, of course. This is a fun series with the distinction that Enola breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to viewers at times.

I started watching Cranford via Hulu a couple of nights when Jim was away. I knew the series was based on a book of the same name by Elizabeth Gaskell, but I didn’t know a couple of her other books were incorporated as well (My Lady Ludlow and a novella titled Mr. Harrison’s Confessions). The series takes place in a small English town in the 1840s, with a small town’s ups and downs. The series portrays the women who make up the main characters as much more gossipy than they are in the books. I loved Judi Dench as Mattie Jenkyns, the quieter, more timid younger sister who has to step out of her comfort zone when her older sister dies. I’m almost finished with the first season.

Reading

Since last time, I have finished (titles link to my reviews):

• None Like Him: 10 Ways God Is Different From Us and Why That’s a Good Thing by Jen Wilkin with a friend. I didn’t review this since I did after my first reading of it, here. This book is worthy of multiple rereads.
• Mist of Midnight by Sandra Byrd. A Gothic-type novel in which a young woman has to flee India, where her missionary family has been killed in an uprising. But when she arrives at her family’s ancestral home in England, she finds that a woman claiming to be her has come beforehand–and has died.
• Theo of Golden by Allen Levi. A cultured, wealthy older man originally from Portugal comes to the small fictional town of Golden, GA on business. When he comes into a coffee shop which has portraits of local people on its walls, he gets the idea to buy the portraits a few at a time and give them to their subjects. His kindness and generosity have a ripple effect across the town. Though the premise didn’t sound very interesting to me at first, and the story was a slow burn, eventually I loved it.
• The Spykeeper of Marseille by Roseanna M. White. A novel based on the real-life story of a woman who headed up a large spy ring in France during WWII, coordinating with MI6 in England. Very good.
• Elisabeth Elliot: The Brave Girl Who Chose to Love by Ellen Vaughn, a children’s book about Elisabeth Elliot.
• You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy by Trisha Pasricha. Not reviewed, not as helpful as I had hoped.

I’m currently reading:

• Insights on Revelation by Charles Swindoll.
• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear.
• Letters to an American Lady by C. S. Lewis.
• How People Change by Paul David Tripp and and Timothy S. Lane.
• Into a Golden Era by Gabrielle Meyer.
• Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell. Watching the series made me want to reread the book.

Blogging

This month marks the 20th birthday of my blog! To celebrate, I am hosting a giveaway here which will end Monday morning.

Besides that and the weekly Friday Fave Fives, Saturday Laudable Linkage, and book reviews, I’ve posted these since last time:

• The Danger of Blessings. We usually think that our trials and struggles are the biggest dangers to our spiritual lives. But our blessings pose a danger as well.
• Aging Is a Series of Reliquishments. It seems that we face continuing losses as we age. But God is gracious to help us face our mortality in increments. As we face each relinquishment, we’re geared a little more toward eternity.
• Assorted Stray Thoughts. A hodgepodge of mostly unrelated ponderings.
• Kinder Than They Deserve. When people speak to us hatefully or dismissively, we’re tempted to respond in kind. But God showed grace–unmerited favor–when we didn’t deserve it, and He wants us to show grace to others.
• The Wrong Kind of Nostalgia. It’s fun to reminiscence about what life was like when we were younger. But nostalgia can take a couple of wrong directions if we’re not careful.

Writing

I did get a bit done on my revisions, but not as much as I had hoped. Our critique group is taking the month of August off.

Looking ahead

The month of August is a busy but happy one for us. My oldest son will be coming to visit for about ten days, when our family will celebrate his birthday and mine as well as enjoying many get-togethers. The ladies event at church that was supposed to happen in July got postponed until August. And I just learned last night that my family from TX will be coming at the end of the month.

How was your July? Are you looking forward to anything in August?

(I often link up with some of these bloggers.)