July in Review – Adventures in a Messy Life

The start of July 2025 has been weird

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Week 1

Pretty much all of my pictures from this week are of the flooding. I don’t even have the screenshots I took elsewhere for the most part. So, you just see the screenshot of the video where you can see a bridge go from drivable to over a foot of water in 2 minutes.

We spent Independence Day doing a Murder Mystery together. We’d done one earlier together and enjoyed it, but this time we got one from a different company and did not enjoy this one as much. It had way more information to go through. There were over 50 different pieces of information to go through, and at the end, I still wasn’t sure I’d read it all, and there was a cipher to break, and I just brute-force cracked it. It took me probably over an hour to break it. I just sat there, slowly decoding it as everyone else read the materials. It was an interesting thing to do, and something I enjoy, but I can’t imagine a lot of people would have the patience to do it. I’m guessing that’s why one of the hints they give is “Here’s a clue on how to crack the cipher.” Which, if I’d read that, would have saved me over an hour, but that would have been totally cheating.

But, as we were doing this murder mystery, I was starting to see the various news reports of the floods, and then Saturday, our backyard and front yard flooded.

That’s what most of these pictures are: our house flooding. It receded by the end of the day, but it was quite a lot of water. At one point, we were in the front yard, and we heard a cracking sound, and it was the neighbor’s fence breaking from the pressure of the TWO FEET OF WATER up against it. Thankfully, the entire fence didn’t go; it was just a few boards coming apart. I think we’ve all learned to build our fences to allow some amount of drainage for storms, so they don’t break all the time.

It’s been a hard week as we’ve been constantly looking for updates on the missing people. I’ve been in a boot with an injured ankle, but I’m finally out this week, so I’m planning to find the various places that have volunteer lists to sign up for volunteering.

Though last I saw, they were turning away volunteers.

The peanut butter jar is the one Leezard stole on Saturday, the same day of all the flooding. We had split up, and I had come out of my bedroom to see Leezard in her crate with that jar of peanut butter and thought it was one of the mostly empty ones we’d given her to lick the last little bits. BUT noooo, it was one that she had stolen off the counter and taken to her crate to happily lick up half a jar of peanut butter.

She was quite proud of herself.

We’re still not quite sure if she figured out how to get the lid off or if someone foolishly left the lid off (and by someone, by process of elimination, we think that was me).

Books read:

Wrinkle in Time
Apprentice of Magic
Reign of Magic
Curse of Magic
One more in this series

Games played:

Week 2

Oh my, it’s August 5 and I better get typing. I thought I was doing so well…

Jeff and I went out to go see the Superman movie together. Originally, Superman himself was going to join us, but he had to work on a school assignment last minute, so he stayed home. I loved it and thought it was a lot of fun. There was so much to discuss with it.

Then I got a huge laugh out of the spelling of my name when I went out to breakfast with Superman one day. There are so many ways my name gets spelled, but this was a particularly amusing spelling.

Okay, you can’t see a thing from that image in the corner, but that is a massive amount of drool that Leezard managed to get all over the drawers and I was just amzed at it.

Then we played Clank together that night as my random gathering of stuff we did.

Books read:

Hunger Games– I buddy read this with Superman, this is actually for all 5 of the books
Picture Perfect Boyfriend– I have very mixed feelings on this book, for reasons I don’t want to explain publicly

Okay most of these books I wrote down after the fact, so many of these I might have read in different weeks.

Games played:

Week 3

Now I’m trying to remember what game that is….Oh yes, that’s my Batman the Animated series game. The game that inspired me to write about cooperative games because I wanted to write about it, but it’s no longer in print, so I just wrote about how much I love cooperative games. I still love that game.

All right…. Now, let’s talk about how I can be stupidly stubborn sometimes, because that’s what that picture next to it is. So, I had earlier lightly sprained my ankle and spent two weeks with my ankle in a boot. This was self-imposed because wrapping it in an ace bandage was not stopping me from doing stuff, but having it in a boot was annoying enough from doing stuff to stop me from doing stuff. It’s just annoying to do stuff. Well, I finally didn’t have a boot on anymore, and so I decided, you know what is a great thing to do? Carpet clean the spare bedroom because you finally can walk again. Also, I had finally finished cleaning out that closet.

You don’t understand what a big deal that was. Whenever we were cleaning upstairs and we were running short of time, we would shove all the stuff in there, and when I started that closet was 4 feet high with STUFF. It is now empty other than the boxes of comics. So I started cleaning the carpets. Well, now I have decided to clean under the bed. So I shoved the mattress and the box spring off, and the frame over. The entire time I’m thinking, this is probably not the light work I should be doing right after getting my ankle out of the boot, but oh well.

But now I have a nice, clean carpet in that room.

Then, we have a nice, fun picture from D&D that weekend, where I had a riddle to solve. I was trapped in a dungeon, and my party members were shouting the riddle down at me as I had to put the items on the pillars. It was a fun riddle to figure out.

Oh, and I have no pictures from this, but the day before, we went over to Sam’s parents’ house and had dinner with them. It was a cool reminder to go and see them and talk with them and reminisce about old times.

Then the final picture is a bit of repair work that was going on, but the way they had removed the piece of sidewalk looked like a giant had come along and was flipping over the sidewalk like it was a building block and that amused me.

Books read:

The Season of Dragon– Pride and Prejudice told from the point of view of Caroline Bingley, AND she’s the heroine AND there are dragons. All in all this was a very fun book, and I never thought I would side with Caroline Bingley, but I did.
Baptism by Fire– we were talking about this in the Lorehaven Guild and so I decided to reread it and then the next two books in the series are out, and so I read them.
Friendly Fire– But it’s a buddy cop urban fantasy mystery series, which is a rare thing to find in a world of super serious or grim dark.
Playing with Fire– I like the light feel, to it, and I think there is a slight chance I could solve the mysteries if I were paying attention. I might try when I reread them next time.

Games played:

we continued playing Shadows of Brimstone, we’re working through the Caverns of Cynder missions

Week 3 4

The day before my birthday, I talked with one of my high school friends, the pot of tea is that picture, we talked over Zoom, and the pot is her Christmas present to me a year or so ago. The cups reminded her of the cups from STNG. She gave me a fun craft kit. I’ve come up with a wonderful idea for her birthday, which I think I might have to punt and make it her Christmas present, and come up with a different birthday present.

But, the next day was my birthday, and we played games, watched Much Ado About Nothing, which made me very happy, and we had delicious food.

I got some very fun presents: a cool Snoopy-inspired tea cup, The Artist gave me a rooster creamer, and Superman gave me a Lewis and Clark logic deduction game that I really like, which I need to play with him at least one more time before he goes up to college.

Then, on the very last day of the month, I went with my now no longer high school girls and their little sisters, and The Artist’s unofficial little sister, and saw the Zilker musical, Bring It On, which has only a very vague resemblance to the movie it is based on. They both have cheerleaders in them. That’s about the only thing in common. The music is by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and there are some parts of it where you can definitely tell he wrote it. The book is very similar to Hamilton in parts.

Books read:

Tusks, Tails, and Teacakes– a cozy fantasy with a romance as a side story, I enjoyed it, but there wasn’t anything that stood out about it
Jack McFadden and the Faerie Realm- I have spelled this wrong and I don’t want to bother finding my iPad to get the right spelling, but this was a middle grade book that was cute and fun to read, that I read more under the “Read the books I have on my kindle that are unread” than because I had a great desire to read it. Though it does have a nice dramatic cover that I had not realized it was middle grade at first. The illustration is not clearly middle grade; it could be YA from the cover art. But it was a fun little tale to read in an hour or so.
Secrets of a Duke– Also read as part of my “Read the books I’ve bought that I haven’t read yet,” I bought a bunch of books that were either free or 99 cents because authors do all of those sales and this was one of those Regency romance books claiming to be vaguely in the style of Jane Austen. It’s not, but it is amusing. This is actually the second in the series, and I read the other book in the series first. So let me write that one down.
Reputation at Risk– So it’s the amusing idea of a Regency family that is down on its luck so the daughter is drawing cartoons to help her family scrape by because as soon as the heir to the home is found they will be out on the street and she needs to save up enough money so her sisters can find good husbands. Cute and fun, I wouldn’t but it at full price, but for 99 cents worth the price.
Heart of the Curiosity– I bought this a couple of years ago and was never in the mood to read it, and finally decided to read it because the author is one of my favorites. I stayed up way too late finishing it, and thoroughly enjoyed the book. It’s a fun little book that falls into the New Adult category.
Fellowship of the Ring– this was our quest book for the Guild this month, and so it was fun to reread it again.

Games played:

Flamecraft– I love this game, I may not have figured out how to play it well, but the artwork and how it’s not super competitive, but it is competitive and the dragons, and it’s just awesome
Shadows of Brimstone
Transamerica– because this game is awesome

And that was July!