Back at the end of April I had decided I would take a photo a day in May. That would have been a great idea, if I had remembered I had challenged myself to do that. Sigh.
As I mentioned on my Saturday Afternoon Chat post, I didn’t do very well to begin with, but I am back on track. I also plan to stretch the challenge into June to make up for the lost days.
I thought I’d share the photos I took when I remembered to do so. I also have a couple of photos I took on a day, but didn’t take for the project. It was simply a photo I took for one reason or another.
I added a couple of extra photographs from each day as well.
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing, and some weeks I share what I am listening to.
What I/we’ve been Reading
It took until around Chapter 9, but I finally got into Fellowship of the Ring. Or it finally picked up, whichever. I mean, I guess I liked it before then but a character I remember from the movies showed up around Chapter 9 and that’s when things started to really pick up. Now I’m moving through it much faster and would love to be able to finish it by the end of the week, but I’m not sure I will. I have enjoyed listening to it some of the time on Audible and reading it part of the time. Friday night I sat on the back porch and read a couple of chapters of it, which took quite a while since the chapters are so long.
I also started reading Death of a Poison Pen by M.C. Beaton. It’s a Hamish Macbeth Mystery and takes place in Scotland. It’s a much lighter read than Fellowship of the Ring so I’m using it to break up the old style of Tolkien’s writing but I will probably focus on FOTR this week because I do want to know what happens. Yes, I did watch the movie but I sort of glazed over after hour two and got a bit lost. I’d rather read it.
I finally gave up on Anne’s House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery. It was terribly depressing and I once heard a reader say life was too short to read a book you don’t enjoy so I finally put it back on the shelf. I’ll try some of the other books in the series at another time.
Little Miss and I are reading On The Other Side of the Hill by Roger Lea MacBride. Some nights we are reading The Miss Piggle Wiggle Treasury.
The Boy is reading Fellowship of the Ring.
The Husband was on vacation this week and even with taking kids to appointments, washing dishes, mowing the lawn, and helping to take care of a sick dog he managed to read six books and start a seventh.
The books he read:
The Infernals by John Connelly
Out of Range by CJ Box
The Scared Stiff by Donald Westlake
Bye-Bye, Baby by Ace Atkins
Number One is Walking by Steve Martin
Standing by the Wall by Mick Herron
The one he is reading now: Don’t Ask by Donald Westlake
What’s Been Occurring
I wrote yesterday about our drama last week with Zooma the Wonder Dog. You can read about it in this post.
You can also see some of our photos from the week there but I will share a few here too.
What We watched/are Watching
Little Miss and I found two other Mary Berry series on Tubi on the Roku this week so we watched those episodes throughout the week.
I watched My Favorite Wife for my Spring of Cary feature with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and decided it was not my favorite Cary movie.
An Affair to Remember is up for this week.
The Husband and I watched Oceans 11 this week. The original with the Rat Pack etc. That was some ending. Whew.
We also watched a super creepy episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents with Dick York from Bewitched. Yikes. He was a very good actor and very underrated.
We also started Carefree with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but both had to head to bed for some sleep so we will finish it later.
I also watched a few art videos and a couple of YouTubers this week but had to take a break from the YouTubers as some of them grate on me because after a bit they all start to sound the same. They talk about the same books and wear the same clothes and skip in the same fields and it is starting to get a bit weird. I’m sure I’ll still watch a few of them, including Forgotten Way Farms, which is different from all the other “Young Woman Reading Cottage Core Style Books and Filming Herself Wearing Old Clothes and Skipping through A Field of Flowers.”
What I’m Writing
I worked on finishing Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing every day this last week and hope to have it finished this upcoming week. You can pre-order it here:
It is coming out July 18th now instead of June 20th.
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
Even before I looked back at the photos from July, I knew the month had been busy, but looking at all the photos from the month, solidified that for me.
There were a lot of pool visits, a lot of running through sprinklers, a musical, grocery shopping trips, visits with friends, parades, carnivals, visiting my parents, cookouts, anniversary dinners, and blowing bubbles.
Scrolling down through Instagram and there is the writer I could have had got to know better but chose not to, for various reasons.
And there she is promoting a friend’s book yet again. I look at her post and I wonder if that book could have been mine if I hadn’t decided to step away from the author’s group, where I felt she taught people how to manipulate other people into buying things they really don’t need.
A part of me feels sad.
“Look at all the people she knows, all the places she travels, the experiences she has had and the success she’s reached,” I thought to myself.
Once upon a time I thought that would be me. I thought I’d travel the world and meet fascinating people and be liked by many.
I’ve never been pretty but sometimes I could write pretty words and take pretty photos. Sometimes I imagined that writing pretty and taking pretty photos would distract people from the fact I wasn’t pretty. I have yet to see an author or a photographer with a big following on any of the social media sites who isn’t pretty. That’s a deeper issue to delve into on another day.
It’s weird how I once imagined I would do all these big and grand things but never did and now – it might you surprise you to know – I’m glad I didn’t.
Thank you, Jesus that I’m still just little me in my little house with my kids and my husband and my dog and cat and that sometimes I get to photograph sweet families and sometimes I get to write about neat things
It turns out I don’t need anything big after all.
Big means stress and rushing and running and I don’t thrive on any of that. What I do thrive on are quiet nights at home, a good book, a cup of hot herbal tea, a good, heartwarming show and slow, purposeful days where I can take time to remind myself where I am and who I am.
I’ll take the quiet life any day over all the stress I once thought I wanted.
