Book list for August 2019

All library books:

The Illustrated Compendium of Amazing Animal Facts. Maja Safstrom.
O is for Outlaw. Sue Grafton
Knitting Heaven and Earth: Healing the Heart with Craft. Susan Lydon.
Death of a Travelling Man. M. C. Beaton.

My favorite was probably the animal facts books because it had charming pictures. The mysteries were par for the course and the knitting book was not for me.

Evelyn started a new school year at a new school.  Every single day was blazing hot.  I knitted a bunch of hats. 

July 2019 book list and a summery update.

All library books. All mysteries.  All from series I've been enjoying already.

A Fatal Winter. G. M. Malliet.
Death of a Scriptwriter. M. C. Beaton.
Dark Domain.Val McDermid.
Nightblind. Ragnar Jonasson.

Other things from July:

Being the fireworks aunt when my nephews were in town for VBS.  (My dad is the tractor driver and my mom is the 'snacks and random firestarter' person, so we're all really cool now.)

I feel like I've eaten out a lot and I don't feel bad about it (I normally worry about the cost and nutritional value, or lack thereof).  It's mostly been chicken strips.  It's been convenient and fun. 

I don't know that my yarn stash is very manageable, but it's fairly organized and I have plans for at least half of it.  Which is good, because I bought some more today.  It was thrilling.

I am mostly caught up on laundry. We are mostly ready for the new school year.  "Mostly" is perfectly good enough for me.

I love life, but my face still looked like it did when I was harried.  So I changed moisturizers and I feel like that helped.

I may or may not be successfully raising succulents.  It's so hard to know with them.  But so far, my nondead ones look okay. 

Morning glories are still my favorite thing to wake up to.

I think Evelyn and I have done maybe half the things we wanted to do this summer.  That's fairly great, but I'd like to do more and I'd like to do everything more often. 

But I'm off work all this week so today we walked part of a trail at Toltec Mounds, ate not-BBQ things at a BBQ place in Scott, checked out a produce stand and bought another succulent in a fun planter (along with some okra to surprise Cody with!), played at a park where we were the only people at the playground, hit up a yarn store, and had ice cream after we picked up Cody from work.

This is in the kitchen windowsill now!  It's so fun!

I'm realizing 1) that should have been a bullet-point list and 2) I left out the part where I bought Evelyn a grab bag at the Toltec Mounds State Park gift shop and she got a geode that she broke herself AND a flute that she is doing her darnedest to learn to play.

Today I climbed a tree with Evelyn at the park.  Cody can't get over this picture of me from today because it's been so long since he's seen me up a tree.  I felt right at home.

Photo credit to Evelyn.

June 2019 book list

Death of a Nag. M.C. Beaton*
N is for Noose. Sue Grafton*

May 2019 book list and a few small updates

Here are the books I finished up in May:

M is for Malice. Sue Grafton.* Kinsey Milhone is still doing her thing where she solves mysteries in the late 1980s, and I am apparently still doing my thing where I check out these books and read them in order.

An Event in Autumn. Henning Mankell, translated by Laurie Thompson.*  I saw this at the library and did a double take because I thought I had read all the Kurt Wallander mysteries that existed.  But this was translated in 2012 and I missed it somehow.  It was a nice surprise, and very much needed.

Wicked Autumn. G.M. Malliet.*  A standard cozy mystery except!  The mystery-solving priest is a former MI-5 officer with a tragic past! And he became a priest in a rural English village to get away from danger and horror!  Which is ridiculous because everyone knows that the moment a new priest comes to a quaint, rural village the dead bodies just pile up from all the murders.  This is the first in a series and I'm enjoying it enough to keep going even though the pacing is not my favorite.

Other things from May
-Little neighbor boy and baby of the family, Dallas, graduated from high school!  We were proud and happy.  He was tall and only somewhat embarrassed by us.

-We had a little family gathering around Mother's Day!

4 generations of women who just love to have their picture taken.

-Evelyn got glasses!  She's so cute in them and can see all kinds of things she didn't realize she was missing.  Also, she thinks we might look alike now that we have glasses.  Apparently we didn't before this.

-At the beginning of the month, we found out that Evelyn's school was closing down.  It was a whole thing.  It was unexpected and sad and now we're going to send her somewhere that costs significantly more, which we didn't budget for because we thought she was going to her little school for a few more years.  I hate everything about this, but I'm trying to remember to be grateful for the time she had there and all the things she learned in a wonderful environment.

-Not unrelated to the last thing, we're on a bit of a no-spend at the moment!  It's going okay.  I still signed Evelyn up for swimming lessons and she had her first lesson today.  After she ate her little sack lunch we went to the library and read for over an hour and a half.  This is mostly what I checked out.

-I went part-time about 6 weeks ago.  It's a temporary thing that will last until the fall, but I'm really happy that I get to do this (even with the smaller paychecks at an inconvenient time).  I spend the first few days off frantically rushing around to take care of tasks I'd neglected for months before it was time to pick up Evelyn from school.  By the time I was ready to relax, I wound up spending the time touring schools.  But last week I took Evelyn to my parents house and got to play with my nephews for a bit before all the cousins spent the next 3 days together.  And yesterday Evelyn and I did nothing.  And today we barely did more than nothing.  I can't wait to do more of it.

April 2019 book list

As far as I know, I finished one book last month.  It was Let Me Lie, by Clare Mackintosh.  It looked haunting when I saw it on the library shelf.  It had too many twists and the ending made me mad.