The Summer Flew By: August Highlights│Monthly Reset #11

Hey Bookworm friends! I kept intending to do wrap-ups for June and July and somehow time got away from me. The summer flew by so I’ll just share my August highlights. It was a weird month of two halves. One half had me down for the count for two weeks due to my dental surgery (yay, now that’s done and I can breathe!). The other half was bursting with back to back events and celebrations! As much as I live for the summer, I’m glad it’s now September so I can have a more solid routine again. 😅

Link-ups

August Highlights

• My mom invited me to see the musical Pride & Prejudice* (*sort of) and we had such a wonderful time! It’s a retelling of the classic Austen story, as told by the servants of the household. It was brilliant and hilarious and I was constantly in awe of the talented cast of 5 women! It’s easily one of my favourite plays I’ve ever seen if not ✨THE FAV ✨ (if the pain in my jaw from laughing too much is anything to go by).
• My birthday was thoroughly celebrated on multiple days, I have to say I was incredibly spoiled. Amongst my many thoughtful gifts were those flowers (Veronica Speedwells) & a wooden puzzle that I used as a distraction from my tooth pain after the surgery!
• For our 2nd wedding anniversary, my husband and I got to try a new Board Game Cafe, which is our date night of choice.
• We went to a friend’s wedding at a botanical garden and we had the best time! The entire celebration was filled with nerdy personal touches that I loved like D&D themed vows & LOTR music. There were games, lots of dancing, and catching up with a ton of friends we hadn’t seen in a while! What a memorable night that felt like such a full-circle moment🥲.
• Then the next day we got to see Coheed & Cambria live again but this time with some high school friends. The entire concert was fantastic but it started raining during the encore which ended up being the perfect way to end the night. Screaming the lyrics to ‘Welcome Home’ together in the rain was epic and filled with nostalgia.
  

What I Watched

The Librarians is one of my favourite shows. I mean, it’s a campy fantasy about Librarians who protect the world from magical dangers, how could I not love it? So I was super excited to watch the newest incarnation of it and it delivered on the vibes. We’d also been watching all of The White Lotus this summer, I think I enjoyed season 1 the most. This show always put my nerves on the edge but it was very entertaining. I’m kind of sad that I’m not loving Strange New Worlds, I find the quality between episodes varies too wildly. There’s also too much focus on Spock’s love life. The fact that it’s a prequel to the Original Show, takes away the tension so I just find those plot-lines a waste of time. After this season, I don’t think I’ll bother continuing on. Avatar is one of my comfort shows so we put it on while making the puzzle and had the coziest evenings 🖤

Games I Played

I love to play cooperative games with my husband so he got me a bunch for my birthday😍. Witchtastic is a cooking-against-the-clock game, kind of like overcooked but with magical potions. It’s addictive and I love the variety of different ingredients we have to harvest like rat tails, ghosts, and swamp monster eyes. There’s also a solo mode which I’m playing now. Spacelines from the Far Out is also a fast-paced game where you’re running your own commercial spaceship taking aliens from planet to planet. You must keep the customers happy while balancing the needs of the ship such as fixing broken parts, oh and avoid getting hit by asteroids! This short game was wacky and cute.

I hadn’t played Clank! in years but I remembered liking it and I still really do! It’s a deck-building game where you’re trying to quietly delve into a dungeon looking for treasure. If you clank around too much you’ll wake up the dragon and get scorched before you can escape with your loot! We found Era in our local board game cafe and have since played it several times. It’s a game about building the best medieval town by placing different types of buildings that give you rewards. You collect resources to build by rolling dice and each type of building has a different shape, which can be placed on your pegged board kind of like Tetris. This strategy game has quickly become one of our new favourites

Crafty Corner

I finished my first ever crochet blanket earlier in the summer but I just hadn’t shared it yet! It’s ‘lapghan’ size, perfect for the pup to burrow in. I ended up having enough yarn to sew all the squares together, I only ran out of the clay colour yarn as I was making the border (peep the one brown section at the bottom 😆). The hardest part was learning how to sew the granny squares to meet up with perfectly straight corners but I think it was worth it! I learned so much from making this blanket; every step had new techniques to try and fresh problems to solve but I enjoyed all of it.

Links To Share

Other Links Worth Checking Out

As a person who thinks and posts about books on social media, I really appreciated this article about anti-intellectualism and the commodification of books. Find it on Dylan Thomas’s Substack, ‘So It Goes’.

The Amazine posted a gorgeous poem that my friend wrote, entitled Broken Hearts and Cages. I’m so proud of her and if you like poetry, please go give it a read!

I loved this Youtube video on Why Clutter Isn’t Bad – Designing My Home Like Old Children’s Books, basically a love letter to clutter as ‘good mess’ and storytelling.

Lastly, I’d be incredibly remiss not to share the link to my Go Fund Me campaign for the family in Gaza that I support. Sondos and her family really appreciate any help you can give. On top of the fact that they’re starving and have no decent shelter, her father needs urgent surgery to replace his knee joints and is worse pain every day.
If you made it this far into my post, thank you 🖤! I know it’s a lengthy one today.

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