Wrestling Banquet

 John's wrestling banquet was held in early August outside at a local restaurant. It was an unusual banquet at an unusual time of year for an unusual wrestling season, but we're just grateful that a wrestling season happened at all!

These guys had so much fun together. It was a good group and team. 

It's bittersweet when seniors graduate and move on. The four guys on the right end were the captains and seniors. And the guy they're holding was the team's all star and is going to a boarding school now where he can do wrestling the whole year. These five guys were a huge asset to the team! 

But, time to move on. Yesterday was the first practice of the new season, and hopefully it will be a much more normal season than last year. John is excited for it! 

Birthday/Cape Leftovers

 Well, it's almost December so it's time to blog about August! 😄 I've fallen behind and I'm going to try to get caught up in the next couple of months and bang out August within the next two weeks and then move on to September and try to get that done before years' end too. I continue to faithfully document my life on my blog even though my life is busier than ever because this is still the easiest and most enjoyable way to do it. At the end of the year, I have a blog book made of all of my posts and pictures. Voila, done. Plus it helps keep my writing and editing skills up. So even if I'm the only one reading (which gratifyingly my stats say that I'm not!), this is still totally worth my time!

Here are a few more birthday pics that didn't make it into my July birthday post because I took these pictures the next day, which was August. How pesky having my birthday fall on the last day of the month! Just kidding, I actually like it because I have all month to look forward to it!

Presents!

Sam picked out a cool 3-D snowy owl bookmark that is now one of my favorites (yes, I do have a bookmark collection 😁).

And a few random pics from around the Cape house...

I'm not totally a crazy owl lady--those owls aren't usually there, I just put them there for fun because I'd bought them recently to add to my fun little collection at home. I guess I am a crazy owl lady. 😆

The toy area in the basement, organized the way I like it, but not meant to last (renters!).

July 2021 Randoms

 I feel like I've been doing blog posts about July forever. Here's the last one, finally! At least for 2021, that is. Hopefully there will be more July posts in the future about the years to come, unless this dog and pony show gets shut down, or I die, or something sad like that. ANYWAY, I digress.

The president of Penn was nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

 <Insert sarcasm>I'm sure that Biden getting a center at Penn named after him and a special visiting type of professorship gig before he became president had nothing to do with it.<end sarcasm> I will say that I do think Amy Gutmann has been a very effective and successful president of Penn for the last almost two decades. But I don't like her politics. I don't think I'd be able to last four years at an Ivy League school anymore the way that I was able to 20 years ago. I'd get so fed up with all the woke and liberal bullcrap that's out there now. 

Healthy and delicious!

There's a restaurant I like to go to for lunch after I go to the temple and I get their chicken kebab plate every time. It's so good!

Sauteed veggies again cooked in the special orange olive oil that I got in Mystic. Deeee-lish!

🙌

I forgot to put this in yesterday's humor post, so here it is now.

Notifications about the tropical storm that brought a snapping turtle into my life 😆

Pretty

I'd love to go to Cornwall, England. Someday!

After almost 18 months away because of Covid, I got to go to the temple again. It was so good to be back. It felt like reuniting with an old friend. My testimony of the temple has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years, and I truly love the time that I spend there. 

John had fun at Stake Youth Conference. I copied these two pictures from off the Stake Facebook page. He met a girl there (the one next to him in the picture) who's become a good friend (possibly more??) since then. 

Can you find John? Probably not. I had to zoom in to find him. He's in the second sitting row, fifth from the left.

I found this great navy blue owl sweater from Talbot's. Look at all the cute little owls with their gold and green bodies! 😍

Every summer I aspire to go on a picnic, and every summer I fail to do so. Maybe next summer will finally be the summer that it happens!

I wish we'd done a trip to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore when we lived in Iowa.

I'd been wanting to try "forest bathing" for awhile, so I finally did it, and I wasn't very impressed. I expected to like it more than I did because I love forests and nature and mindfulness and that sort of thing. But it wasn't quite what I thought it would be. Oh well, at least now I know for myself what it's all about. 

Notes on the News from The WSJ on my birthday

Adios July! It was a good and busy month!

Wisdom, Humor, and Inspiration in July

 There's a little more "wisdom, humor, and inspiration" than usual for July because of being on vacation and having more down-time, which meant more time on my phone taking screen-shots of things I liked.

Here they are, in the order they were taken...

"Without a strong commitment to the Lord, an individual is more prone to have a low level of commitment to a spouse. Weak commitments to eternal covenants lead to losses of eternal consequence." ✔

I love verse 6. 

Mushrooms 😋

Prehistoric blogs!

I have a long way to go to doing this every day, but I do aspire to it. 

Yes! 😆

Some Sense and Sensibility humor

This truth brings me a lot of comfort and peace.

I love reading and I always have a book that I'm reading, but I've long been guilty of buying more books than I actually have time to read...

Which is why this is true...😂

I can totally relate to this

I love it when President Nelson (or any leader, church or otherwise) tells it how it is.

Having an eternal perspective makes a huge difference in one's happiness level in life! 

This was when Jeff Bezos (who got divorced last year) did his SpaceX flight in July. 😆

Ben Franklin would be proud of me--for the most part, I think that I do own my faults and I genuinely work hard to fix them. Well, most of them. 😄

😂😂😂