Those first cool breezes of fall have arrived this week and felt so lovely! The leaves are just starting to change, and I hope they take their time about it. I when the leaf color changeover is slow and steady rather than quick. I suppose the weather and water levels might effect how that goes.

Family activities

My TX family came to visit the first week this month, spending a couple of days here and then driving don to SC to see family there. We didn’t have any major outings–just thrift shopping, discovering a new restaurant, and lots of eating and talking. We had such a good time. I hope it is not another four years before we do it again.

We celebrated my youngest son’s 33rd birthday, and Jason, Mittu, and Timothy had us over for Grandparent’s Day.

The last half of the month did not go so well, with an extended bout of atrial fibrillation and a sore throat. But things are better on both fronts now.

Creating

I made just one card this month, for Jesse’s birthday.

He likes both video games and medieval stuff, so sometimes I go one way and sometimes the other. This design was one from the Cricut.

Watching

We like watching series because then you don’t have to think about what to watch next. You just go to the next episode. But we were between series, so we caught a few movies.

I Can Only Imagine 2 is, as the title suggests, the sequel to I Can Only Imagine. The first film tells the story of Bart Milland of Mercy Me: his mother leaving, living with his abusive father, trying to start a band that didn’t get much traction until he wrote the song “I Can Only Imagine” based on his fathers transformation after he came to know the Lord. After all those positives, Bart hit bottom again. Though he reconciled with his father, he still had pain from his past. He felt he didn’t know how to parent well due to not having a good example. His oldest son developed juvenile diabetes. Their relationship was not good. A man who was the band’s opening act who was also dying of cancer helps point Bart back to finding meaning, purpose, and faith even in suffering, leading to their song “Even If.”

We don’t watch movies like this very often, but we saw The Quiet Place and The Quiet Place Part 2 about murderous aliens that invade earth who can’t see but have very sensitive hearing. It was quite intense! The first one has very little dialogue but a lot of sign language, thankfully with subtitles. I liked the strong sense of family. The second one has a few bad words.

Love Across Time was in Prime Video and is about an American real estate agent whose bank merges with an English one. She has to travel to England to decide what to do about some old estates. She stays in one and finds in the basement a mirror that, instead of showing her reflection, shows someone dressed up like an English lord. Turns out he is an English lord from 1799. They talk, and when she has an allergic reaction, he comes through the mirror to rescue her. But then he can’t get back. He investigates modern life while she tries to figure out how the mirror works. And, of course, they fall in love. This was kind of cute. There was nothing objectionable except for one character’s consultation about the possible mystical reasons the mirror operates as it does, but then they decide it’s someone ties to certain phases of the moon.

Even though we’re not into Star Wars, we had enjoyed The Mandalorian a few years back. But we hadn’t kept up with the story as it carried on through various other programs. We did catch The Mandalorian and Grogu and enjoyed it.

Then we did find a couple of short series. We watched The Hardacres while subscribed to Britbox for a while. The title family worked on the Yorkshire fish docks in the 1890s until the father is injured and the mother loses her job. They begin their own enterprise, and when they do well, they seek financial counsel. When the gold mine they invest in strikes it rich, they buy a mansion and try to make a home in high class society–which doesn’t always go well. This is mostly clean except there are a couple of instances of people waking up next to someone they should not have been with, but nothing explicit is shown.

I got frustrated with Britbox with showing all but the last few episodes of the second season, requiring at that point subscription to the next level of Britbox, which is charged for a year at a time rather than monthly and for which no refund is given if you cancel.

We also discovered When Hope Calls. It’s a spin-off of the wildly popular When Calls the Heart on Hallmark. I had seen the first four seasons of When Calls the Heart years ago when it was available on something else (I forget what). But then I couldn’t see the rest of it without subscribing to Hallmark, which I didn’t want to do at the time. I think this new series was on Hallmark, but the first two seasons are available for a time on Netflix. The third season, for some reason, is on Great American Pureflix. The premise is that two orphaned sisters who were separated when their parents died find each other as adults and start an orphanage in a small prairie town in Canada in the early 190s. Oddly, though, one sister quits the series at the end of the first season, and the other shortly thereafter. A previously unknown aunt come to take over the orphanage. We also get to know some of the quirky townspeople. The show is squeaky clean and very Hallmark-ish.

Finally, we’re currently watching the second season of Crossroad Springs, also on Pureflix. It’s a Christian series, or at least somewhat so, about a pastor who comes to help his rancher father during a crisis. In the first season, the pastor was planning to head back to Chicago. But he finds ways he can be used in this small town. The second season seems to be about developing relationships and dealing with an unethical neighbor. The show is clean and wholesome, but it suffers from what a lot of early Christian films did. It almost seems fakey, though it’s not meant to be.

Reading

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

• A Small Book for the Anxious Heart: Meditations on Fear, Worry, and Trust by Ed Welch. Good.
• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear. Good.
• The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge, fiction, audiobook, a story of renewal in several forms. A middle-aged woman from London moves to the house her aunt left her in the country. Good.
• The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge, fiction. The first of her Elliot family trilogy. Very good.
• Mr. Harrison’s Confessions (novella) by Elizabeth Gaskell. A cute story about a young man coming to his first position as a doctor but whose boss/mentor doesn’t want him to vary from the old established practices. Then he finds himself engaged to the women at once without knowing how that happened.
• The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith, fiction, audiobook, about a vicar with Job-like troubles. An older classic mentioned in a lot of other classics. I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I thought I would.
• The Lost Story of Via Belle by Melanie Dobson, fiction, audiobook. A dual time novel in which a prolific novel-writer falls for a man who turns out to be a disaster. She disappears with no one ever knowing what became of her. A fledgling screenwriter who grew up with her books comes to the area in modern times and tries to piece together what happened. Good.
• Every Given Day by Cathy Gohlke, fiction, audiobook. Set at the end of and just after WWI, first the Spanish flu epidemic breaks out and causes devastation. Then a great number of children who survived the flu came down with juvenile diabetes, a fatal diagnosis at the time. This story takes us one one family’s journey and the near-miraculous discovery of insulin. Good.
• How People Change by Paul David Tripp and and Timothy S. Lane. Review coming soon!

I’m currently reading:

• In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character by Jen Wilkin with a friend.
• James: Walking in Wisdom by Lydia Brownback with the ladies’ Bible study group at church.
• Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge by Christine Rawlins
• The Powerful Purpose of Introverts by Holley Gerth
• Things We Cannot Keep by Amanda Cox.
• Anna and Her Daughters by D. E. Stevenson, audiobook.

Blogging

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

• Opinions. We all have them, but should we always express them?
• When You Have to Keep Going. God has created us to need rest, but sometimes we have to keep going and rely on His strength beyond our normal capacity.
• Do You Want Peace? We can pray for it, but God has also provided some means to pursue it.
• Grace vs. Presumption. We need to give ourselves and others grace when we’re not at our best. But we shouldn’t go so far as to be presumptuous that we have an excuse to sin at those times.
• Stay in the Rough Waters. A whitewater rafting guide in Africa cautioned that, if you fall out of your boat, you shouldn’t swim towards the quieter waters near the shore: that’s where the crocodiles lie in wait. Our instinct is to seek quietness and calm. But God is with us in troubled waters until He brings us into a calmer place.

Writing

My turn to present a chapter to our critique group is coming up, so I’ve been working away on that. When I do get into my manuscript again, I see how much work it needs and want to delve into it more. But I’m still struggling with making time.

Looking ahead

Thankfully, the calendar isn’t too packed for next month. We’ll decorate pumpkins one night with the kids. I have a dentist’s appointment mid-month, then a pre-op appointment near the end for some oral surgery on my tongue early in November. I am not looking forward to that, but I am looking forward to getting it over with.

How was your September?

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