Juuuuune

Screw alliteration; there are two J months in a row, and I am failing to come up with modifiers beyond "jumping" and "jazzy," so you're just getting extra vowels instead.

Following our lovely trip home to Texas, we got home and began figuring out a much less structured summer than the ones we've had the past few years. Oscar is only doing a few camps, and we aren't doing any more traveling. This means getting to take advantage of things like Summer Movie Club– Oscar and I went to see K-Pop Demon Hunters (sing-along edition!) on the big screen, which was totally worth the $1.75 each. We've also had our first s'mores night of the summer, which Oscar would like us to repeat more often. And we did some Lego and started a puzzle for the first time in a looong time.

We got a pool membership this year, which has meant lots of fun afternoons of splashing around and eating frozen treats from the snack shack. The pool isn't fancy, but it makes me so nostalgic for the hours we spent at our local pool when I was a kid. (They even do Adult Swim!) Plus, the area around the pool is super shady, so I've gotten in some really pleasant hours chatting with friends or reading without worrying about getting a sunburn.

O's June camps were a Hogwarts-themed creative camp at a local children's theater and Coloradology at his favorite outdoor nature camp, which meant field trips to nature centers, animal rescues, and the top of Pike's Peak. (They got the famous Pikes Peak donuts, and I gained new respect for camp counselors who were willing to spend hours on the cog rail with sugared-up tweens.)

We also had plenty of other things to do this month, most exciting of which was finally making it to Red Rocks to see a concert– specifically, Weird Al. Yes, we saw him a year ago. No, we didn't care that the show might be pretty similar. It was in fact even better, at least in part because he played a few songs that weren't on last year's playlist, including one of my favorites: The Captain Underpants theme song. (Listen to it! It is so catchy!) And this time, Oscar got to meet and get his picture taken with Al, which was definitely a highlight of the month/season/year for him.

We also had our now semiannual escape room experience, this time a space-themed room that we escaped with five whole minutes to spare (a new record for us). And Oscar and his friend planned an epic sleepover weekend to wrap up the month.

The dogs have settled into summer, taking advantage of shade and soft places to chill on the back porch. Nutmeg unfortunately went into heat again (we were really hoping we would be able to avoid another three weeks of doggy underwear), but we are planning to have her spayed at the end of the summer.

Books:

• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans: A confident, largely well-constructed book– I was surprised to see that this was Evans's debut, actually, because it avoids a lot of the weaknesses that can plague epistolary novels.
• Replaceable You by Mary Roach: I don't know how Roach makes topics that would normally be way outside of my comfort zone so appealing to me, but this is probably my favorite of her books since Stiff (which I have loved for more than twenty years– I even built freshman comp classes around it).
• The Seven O'Clock Club by Amelia Ireland: A book club read that I will probably forget in its entirety before the book club actually meets.

Movies:

• Pressure: This is an extremely old-fashioned war movie in many ways, but it's central focus– the need for an accurate weather forecast to determine whether and when D-Day can proceed– is fascinating, and the performances are great across the board.
• Backrooms: The first two-thirds of this horror film are extremely effective in creating dread and judiciously employing jump scares. The last third reveals that the writer/director never really knew where he was going with all of this.
• Office Romance: In case you were wondering what it looks like when Brett Goldstein writes a very stupid movie because he has a crush on Jennifer Lopez (who is, along with Betty Gilpin, much better in this than she needs to be).
• Voicemails to Isabelle: The premise is extremely unoriginal, but the main characters are charming enough to make it watchable. I hate how movies like this seem to require unbelievable subplots that hinge on caricatures (in this case, Nick Offerman's celebrity chef), but Zoey Deutch remains adorable.

TV Shows:

• The Boroughs: It's fair for people to call this "Stranger Things with Old People," but that kind of glosses over how much fun it is to see this cast of film and TV veterans navigating monsters and danger. Alfre Woodard is especially good.
• Widow's Bay: Funny and scary and funny about being scary. Matthew Rhys is obviously amazing here, but it's also an excellent showcase for Stephen Root. And the way it plays with lore and storytelling is very smart.
• Sugar: What a weird show. It's sometimes extremely style-over-substance in its presentation, but the lovely, quiet performances from Colin Farrell and Amy Ryan help ground it. I'm still not sure how I feel about the twist, but I do know that I am glad this show got a second season.

Big stitching update: I finished the temperature stitch! It took me eighteen months instead of twelve, but I am very pleased with how it turned out. You can actually see how weirdly warm our winter was in the colors, which would in more conventional years have turned back to more blues and purples in the final two or three lines. Instead, there's at least one flower in December that has the exact same colors as one in August. Anyway, I'll be getting this framed and finding a place to hang it soon!

Now that this is done, I need to go through all the patterns I've collected and make some decisions about what to do next. This sounds like it shouldn't be that hard, but . . . I have a lot of patterns.