Already August

One of the ways you can tell that summer is coming to an end in Colorado is that the fawns start losing their white spots. These twins spent an afternoon in our yard at the beginning of the month– I saw them a couple of days ago, and they are a little bigger and a lot fuzzier, and their spots are nearly gone.

In other end-of-summer news, Jeremy kicked off the month by running the Four Pass Loop (near Aspen) with some friends. This is usually a multiday backpacking route, but they did it in about thirteen hours. Along the way, Jeremy found time to take dozens of pictures.

As Oscar's summer vacation wound down, we planned a few final summer memories. We got to go to a fun Members Only night at the zoo, which included great animal talks on two of O's favorites: the mountain tapir, of which there are only three in US zoos, and the giraffes. We also got to see an armadillo in a hamster wheel, which was a new experience for all of us.

We went to see Spider-Man at the dine-in theater, which we save for special occasions. (The last one was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the boys are both extremely annoyed at having to wait so long for the sequel.) We prepped for this one by showing Oscar the first three Tom Holland movies, though we didn't fully account for how much backstory we would have to provide for a kid who has only seen a handful of MCU movies.

And we enjoyed a Toad the Wet Sprocket concert (. . . the night before school started, a calculated risk in terms of being well rested for the first day of school). We saw them a couple of years ago and had been looking for a chance to see them again because they put on a great show. This concert was at a small outdoor venue with an extremely steep lawn, so we spent a lot of the show pushing ourselves back up the hill, but it was a great night nonetheless. Perfect weather, lovely opening act (a very cheerful Augustana), and great performances of some of our favorite songs (they played "Crazy Life" this time!).

And then Oscar started sixth grade! Somehow! Because he is still at the same school, this should perhaps have felt less dramatic, as first days of school go. But it feels like a big one to me, maybe because he's now the age my students were when I first started teaching in 2002. (How?) This year his uniform changed to khaki (instead of navy) pants/shorts, and he has his first locker.

Jeremy's second major run of the month was the Telluride Mountain Run, which involves terrain difficult enough that the race directors have to make it clear that this race is not for beginners. Some of that terrain messed with Jeremy's knee early in the race, so he dropped at seventeen miles to avoid doing any damage, but he got to see some amazing views and was happy with his performance. And his DNF meant that we got to spend Sunday morning taking a lovely walk and enjoying coffee before heading home.

The week after Telluride, Oscar and I tried out for a local theater production of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. We had a great time prepping our monologues, and the callbacks proved that this is going to be a very energetic show full of extremely funny kids. And we got great parts! I'm going to be Grace, the mother/pageant director, and Oscar is playing my son Charlie! One of his besties also got a part, which makes him even more excited. This is going to be his first non-school production, and I am hoping that he loves it. (He definitely got my theater kid gene, so I think chances are pretty good.)

And at the end of the month, I attended my first political debate. Prior to that night, I think the closest I'd been to this was either watching televised presidential debates with friends in grad school or trying to avoid Tom Cotton when he came to our favorite burger place in Arkansas. This event– a doubleheader featuring the congressional and gubernatorial candidates– was a great chance to see our incumbent congressman blame Biden for something every three minutes. (The crowd eventually started laughing every time it was clear he was goin that direction, even though the moderators politely asked us not to.)

In dog news, we got Nutmeg spayed, and she spent a few very dopey days laying around the house in what's called a Surgisuit, since we realized that even if there are e-collars big enough for this creature, we didn't want her wearing one in our house. She has been healing up well and is ready for us to let her run around naked again, but the stitches haven't quite dissolved yet. Since we have also hit our end-of-summer rainy season, which is basically just a short thunderstorm almost every afternoon, Turtle has spent many hours hiding from the weather in the hallway.

Books:

• We Burn Daylight by Bret Anthony Johnson: Romeo and Juliet reimagined in 1993 Waco. (I described it this way to a nurse's assistant and realized that she was likely born in the twenty-first century and had no idea what I was talking about.)
• Day by Michael Cunningham: His writing is gorgeous, because of course, and it captures a certain aspect of domesticity during the pandemic without feeling too maudlin about it. But it's also surprisingly slight, likely because it doesn't deploy the "same day over multiple years" format very well.

Movies:

• Spider-Man: Brand New Day: Necessarily somber compared to its predecessor, this installment follows a lonely Peter Parker navigating a world that has forgotten him while Jean Grey, for some reason, goes around messing things up.
• Six: The Musical: My second pro-shot of the summer! I have been bopping along to this soundtrack for a few years now, but it was really fun to see it in concert (since that's basically the conceit of the show). It would have been nice if the camera could have stayed still from time to time, though.
• The End of Oak Street: When this came out, Jeremy saw a headline somewhere calling it the best Spielberg movie of the year, and I just kept thinking about that as dinosaurs wandered through suburban backyards. The plot here is dumb, as are the humans, but that doesn't mean it isn't fun.

TV Shows:

• Ride or Die: Just as I loved seeing Emma Thompson and Judy Greer getting to play action hero/villain in Dead of Winter, I loved getting to see Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer as women of a certain age in this show about an assassin and her best friend.
• The Afterparty: We are late to this one, but it is right up our alley. Each season begins with a death, and each episode is told from a different character's perspective– which means different details, different styles, different characterizations– and, just as importantly, in a different genre. (Season 2 has absolutely spot-on Wes Anderson and Hitchcock episodes.)
• Sterling Point: I actually started this show because the previews featured Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who is great but ultimately kind of beside the point of this surprisingly moving YA series set on a lovely Canadian lake. I wasn't shocked to find out that the showrunner also wrote and directed My Old Ass, which is also surprisingly moving.

In stitching updates, I am making headway with the third of the stamped stitches, hoping to have all four done by Thanksgiving. And I signed up for the Steotchalong, which I have never done before but has broken up with Facebook and moved to Discord, making it possible for me to play.