Sunday Bookends: Gardening, writing like a crazy person, and school’s out for summer (almost)

 Welcome to my weekly post where I recap my week by writing about what I’ve been reading, watching, writing, doing, and sometimes what I’ve been listening to.

What’s Been Occurring

This week I decided to try to start planting my garden even though we do not have the fence up around it yet to keep the deer out.

I don’t have a huge garden space, so I don’t have tons to plant. Little Miss and I decided on beans, beets (which neither of us eat but we’re going to try), yellow squash, cucumbers, kale, sweet red peppers, and tomatoes. My dad picked up topsoil for me about two weeks ago. I should have raked it more after it was dumped into the beds (raised garden beds that my dad and son made for me last year), which I realized when my dad corrected how I had installed the poles for the beans to climb up and also noticed the topsoil issue.

“This dirt could be broken up more,” he said.

Oops.

He also said, “These bean poles should be positioned this way.”

And then he changed my entire set up for the better because he’s been gardening for like 50 years and I haven’t.

I had also planted the bean seeds in the wrong place, so he helped me correct that as well.

The bean poles were his idea since he had extra long bean seeds left from last year. In fact, he had seeds for a variety of vegetables left over from last year that he gave me, which meant I didn’t have to buy any seeds this year.

The seeds are in the ground, but I won’t plant the plants until we have the fencing up because again — the blasted deer.

We also finished homeschooling this week, for the most part. The Boy still has to write a book report on To Kill A Mockingbird and I have a meeting with our homeschool evaluator on Wednesday. Once she signs off on us, and we submit our paperwork to the local school district, our school year will be officially complete and The Boy will be a high schooler (hold me, Jesus!) and Little Miss will be a first grader.

What I’m Reading

I haven’t had as much time for reading as I’ve wanted because I’ve been trying to hit a deadline for Harvesting Hope (formerly The Farmers’ Sons).

I did finish Love Happens at Sweetheart Farm by Dalyn Waller and am almost finished with my Longmire book, Kindness Goes Unpunished by Craig Johnson. (I love Henry. That is all.).

Two books I really want to start this week is Amanda by Sarah Monzon and Relative Silence by Carrie Stuart Parks.

Before I can start them, though, I also have to finish Rooms by James Rubart, which is a very interesting mind-bender.

Little Miss and I are reading On the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder and boy do I have some thoughts on this one. Hopefully I’ll find some time to share those thoughts this week in a separate blog post. Pa Ingalls, seriously, dude — what were you thinking?

What I’m Watching

I am continuing to watch Jonathan Creek through Acorn on Amazon or maybe it’s Britbox. I forget, but it’s on one of those and I watch it through Amazon.

We also watched Galaxy Quest this week, which I think I watched once years ago.

The Boy and I started Master and Commander Blah Blah Blah. I wrote blah, blah, blah because the movie has a really long title to match it’s really long and convoluted storyline. I’m too lazy to look up the full title for this blog post.

We had to stop watching it to go to bed the other night and haven’t returned to it yet. We watched an hour of it and still don’t know what is actually happening other than the ship keeps getting attacked and the captain is keeping them out at sea while more and more people die and he gets more and more arrogant about trying not to be attacked. I don’t know. It’s very confusing.

I also watched episode 5 of The Chosen and loved it. I’ve heard there was some controversy over it, but I haven’t had time to listen to the director talk about what the controversy is about so I will figure it out later. I liked it. That’s all I know.

You can watch the episode on the app, which is very easy to download to your phone (Android or Apple).

What I’m Writing

As I mentioned, I am working on the first draft of Harvesting Hope and plan to have it completed at the end of this week. I’ve been writing anywhere from 500 to 2000 words a day this past week and half of that may be eviscerated during the second draft. We’ll see.

This week I shared two chapters from what I’ve already written, one Friday and one Saturday.

I think I also decided on a book cover — If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been going back and forth on what I want it to look like.

Earlier in the week, I shared some flash fiction I wrote as part of a writing group on MeWe (a social media site).

I forgot to finish my Randomly Thinking post for Thursday (I’m seriously having focus issues), so I hope to have that ready to go this week.

What I’m Listening To

If he hadn’t gotten himself in trouble with a drunken comment, I’d never heard of  Morgan Wallen, most likely. This week my husband tried his album to see what the fuss was all about, so I tried it as well. We both were surprised. We liked it, so I listened to that this week.

For old times sake, I listened to The Civil Wars. I miss them.

I’m leaving you samples of both, so you know who I’m talking about.

So that’s my week in review. How was your week last week? Read any good books? Listen to any new-to-you music or watch anything cool? Let me know in the comments.