My People
My people are scattered. Jonathan is in Canada for the whole month of July. He is WAY north. He’s working at a summer camp for the first time and is having a blast. He is in touch often, (thanks to unlimited international phone plans), he’s having all kinds of adventures and is managing to have a good attitude even though he sprained his ankle and has to wear a brace for a couple of weeks. He’s eating different food, which I haven’t gotten him to do in 18 years and he tells me that everything I’ve heard about the Canadians is true…”they are the nicest people I have ever met”.  He has gone on and on about the kindness of the people. I’m afraid my boy may move to Canada.

Lindsay is now in Uganda. She left a few days ago. We drove to Charlotte on Thursday, stayed with my parents, and she flew out around 7:30 am Friday. By herself. She is overwhelmed often by all the adulting she has to do but I am just plain proud of her. She met up with her team in Orlando then flew to Dubai. The pictures she sent from there were incredible! She spent the night in Dubai, had her own hotel room, which I thought was fabulous, and then made the final flight to Uganda. When she arrived she was greeted by Julius, the older of the two  Ugandan boys who stayed with us last year. I won’t hear from her quite as much in the next 12 days but I know she is in good hands.

I got to see my brother while we were in Charlotte and I can’t tell you how much better he looked than the last time I saw him. He has put on about 35 much needed pounds and is eating like a champ. I am so relieved to see him progressing physically. There are other mountains before him but I’m thankful for every victory he can get.

Caleb is, well, hanging with us. Poor guy. He is plenty busy with work and hanging with his girl, Jenna, but she goes out of town in a few days. He will be house/pet sitting for her family. He just created a new youtube channel called Socially Inept People. I think he wants to just review movies and talk movie geek stuff. Feel free to check it out! We will  try to feed him good and watch all his favorite movies with him while it is just the three of us. And out of the three kids, he is the one most willing to just hang with us and watch stuff anyway. So, he’s good.

My Books
I’m still reading Emma for Austen in August. I’m a little frustrated because the whispersync feature is not working on this one. Normally, if I am listening to a book on my kindle, the whispersync feature holds my place and then when I crawl in bed at night and want to read with my eyes, my place is already marked and I can just pick up where the audio left off. But in this case, for some reason the audio and the book are not connected so not only do I have to make adjustments with where I am in the book, but the chapters are not even laid out the same. In the audio, the book is divided into parts, and chapters within the parts. And that’s how my physical copy of the book is. On my ebook though, it’s just continual chapters. So I might be in Chapter 8 of part two on the audio, then I have to do math and figure out what chapter that is in the ebook. Ugh. I’m calling Kindle support to see if that can be rectified. I don’t wanna do math.

I’m also reading Death and The Penguin by Ukranian author Andrey Kurkov, for book club. Not sure how I feel about it yet, but I know that for book club there’s going to be borscht. And I’m sure you’ll be seeing that here or on instagram.

My Food
I had some fabulous wings last weekend when Mike and I whisked Lindsay away for a quick beach weekend before she left the country. I’m not even a big wing eater, in general, but looking at Brian’s pictures of wings on instagram gave me an appetite for some and I mean to tell you, I hit the jackpot.  I’m finally getting my fill of tomatoes and basil this summer. Blueberries too. Gonna make another blueberry crisp today or tomorrow. (my third). I’ve made one quiche that was pretty average. It was the mushrooms. I waited too long to use them. I made pimento cheese a couple of weeks ago that also wasn’t my best.

That’s it for now. I’ve had more down time this summer than I thought I would so I am trying to enjoy it to the fullest. Hope yours is going great too!