June

I don't think we technically get to use the phrase "June gloom" here, but those are the words that were in my head for the beginning of this month. We got rain almost every day, and the temps stayed very cool as a result. A lot of days started off with some beautiful, deceptive sunshine, only to throw clouds and water and hail at us in the afternoon. Temperatures finally crept up to something even Texans might consider "summer" by the middle of the month, but most days stayed well below 90. It's hard to feel upset about that as we reach the halfway mark between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next.

Speaking of which, this summer has absolutely flown. I guess that's just how 2025 is going to go– breakneck pace, no time for recovery, constantly trying to stay on top of everything that is going on in our lives and in the world. I've spent a lot of time in the past few weeks reading the news and texting frantically with friends about just how far off the rails things seem to have gone. It's been, very luckily, a fairly busy month for work, which helps to give me something else to focus on, but I still find myself mentally tapped out at the end of the day but too anxious to really relax and get good rest.

It also doesn't particularly help that our (relatively) wee puppy has been growing at a pace of at least two to three pounds a week and is already bigger than her "big" brother. Her disposition is as sweet as ever, but she is definitely struggling to figure out where all her paws are at any given moment. It's easier for us to find her paws, especially when one of them is on one of our feet.

Oscar's camps have been a lot of fun, a good mix of stuff he's done before and stuff we're trying out for the first time. At home he has been staying busy playing lots of Mario Kart and wheedling his dad to play boardgames with him whenever they have a spare moment. He's also done some art, played some music, and put together some puzzles.

I squeezed in some summer fun too, including a ridiculous and delicious donut flight with some friends. I've also gotten a little stitching done, though it really isn't much–finally finished up a project I started back in February that I kept avoiding because I hate French knots and did a quick little ornament, which was a lot of fun and gave me some practice using ombre floss.

Books:

• Death at Morning House by Maureen Johnson: If you've read the Truly Devious books, you can think of this one as a less-shiny retread of those. Marlowe isn't as compelling a detective as Stevie, and the shifts between the 1930s crimes and the present ones aren't as seamless. Still, Johnson knows how to craft a fun setting and an interesting ensemble, so it's an enjoyable read, though also one that happily will not have sequels. (Johnson needs to stop interrupting her ongoing series with new series, says someone who started reading the Shades of London books for a project more than a decade ago and would really very much like to know how that story ends.)
• Playground by Richard Powers: This is a book about the ocean, about friendship, about colonialism, about AI. The intertwining narratives slip between characters, places, and times, but they never feel truly disparate and create a fascinating network of ideas. And the writing is just beautiful, especially the descriptions of sea life.
• Faculty Lounge by Jennifer Mathieu: More a series of vignettes than a novel, this tries really hard to capture the experiences of high school teachers and administrators, but it weirdly leaves out . . . students? Anyway, there is a lot to like here about humanizing teachers and finding both humor and tragedy in their day-to-day lives, but it all feels a little more slight than it should.

TV Shows:

• Murderbot: I haven't read the books, though multiple people in my life have enjoyed them a lot. And I didn't find the trailers all that interesting or funny. But the show itself is hilarious, if not always as cohesive as you might wish it would be. A lot of this hinges on Alexander Skarsgard as the title character, obviously, but the ensemble around him doesn't quite hang together yet, in part because those characters feel a little like allegorical figures rather than individual people.
• Hacks: I am way behind the curve on this show, which I have been meaning to watch since it first started. Jean Smart is such a gem–so sharp and fearless, able to make this child of the '80s forget about Charlene from Designing Women altogether. There is plenty of angst and cringe as the relationship between Deborah and Ava develops and evolves, and I have had to take some pauses after major bad decisions because I didn't feel ready to deal with the fallout, but the great thing about this show is that the fallout is almost never what I expect it to be.
• We Were Liars: About eleven years ago, when I was about eight weeks pregnant and hanging out in our hotel alone while Jeremy was at a race, I read E. Lockhart's novel We Were Liars for the first time. When I finished, I sobbed, nonstop, for forty-five minutes. And now the book that has long symbolized pregnancy hormones for me is a miniseries–and it's . . . okay. There were always going to be challenges to telling this story because of spoilery things that I won't name, and I'm not at all convinced on the casting of two of the main teen characters. On the other hand, the miniseries has made a lot of room for the dynamics between the adults in the Sinclair family (likely to set up a second season based on Lockhart's follow-up Family of Liars), and that casting is stupendous. Every single scene with the three adult sisters is electric. They're the reason I kept watching (well, and to see how they navigate those spoilery things).

Movies:

• Lilo & Stitch: I will acknowledge that, in general, I think the Disney live-action remakes are wasteful and unnecessary enterprises that take the original movies, stretch them out by another 45 minutes to an hour, and drain them of the things that made them charming in the first place. This one was different. For one thing, it is a mercifully short (for 2025) one hour and 48 minutes long. For another, the live-action works better than expected, though it never really captures the truly chaotic energy of the original. The makers were wise in maintaining the character designs from the cartoon and matching them with great casting choices. There's been some debate about the ending, but I personally found it really moving.
• Materialists: I was really looking forward to this one. Celine Song's Past Lives is one of my favorite movies of the past few years, and this one looked like a really promising follow-up. And it isn't not promising, but it also feels a little underdeveloped, like it could have benefited from a few more drafts (and a totally different leading lady). Obviously, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans are handsome and charming; this is probably the best either of them have ever looked on-screen (and I'm including Evans's ratty fisherman's sweater moment in Knives Out). But Dakota Johnson feels too flat and insubstantial as the third point in this love triangle, and that has repercussions for the entire project.
• The Minecraft Movie: I regret this.