Intro

I may have posted less on my blog this month, but I have so much to talk about in this wrap up! In August, I have read two books, watched more movies than usual, been on a weekend trip, became a hotel owner to some amphibian friends, discovered new staple dinner recipes, and spent a lot of time outside while getting my steps in.

My increase in outside time has lead to some “Disney Princess” activities. Let’s just say I am an animal whisperer!

This is probably the longest wrap up yet, so buckle in! There’s a lot of yapping in this one, so here are the topics I will cover. You may skip to different aspects of August’s wrap up if you want!

Books

Movies

Music

Life

Closing

Books

Ship of Magic

This is the second trilogy in the Realm of The Elderlings, and you can tell that a lot of writing growth happened. However, even though the writing from Robin Hobb improved and the story was easy to follow, the necessary drama was kind of a bore for me. A lot of people prefer this trilogy to The Farseer Trilogy, however I felt like I was watching a screaming match for half of the book. It was needed to set up the story, but dang.

Also, these characters are super complex, I found myself both loving and hating them at the same time. This series has multiple POVs, where The Farseer Trilogy only had one, so there are a lot more layers here.

Overall, I really enjoyed the story and the setting. Who doesn’t like pirates? Kennit is my favorite character. He is so obliviously psychotic and since only we can see in his head, it is hilarious to juxtapose his thoughts against how much his crew loves him.

The Mad Ship

Robin Hobb is a master of the second book, all of this was just pure build up of action! I took a lot longer to read this one because I had a burst of writing inspiration, but that does not mean I struggled to get through it. I followed everyones stories seamlessly and there was never a point where I was trying to rush through someone’s POV. That is pretty much unheard of for multi POV books for me. Now that we are in the 5th book of The Realm of The Elderlings, the whole world is coming together and I understand it so easily. Sometimes with fantasy, it takes forever to imagine the world that’s being built. Not the case here.

The youths in this novel had the most evolution of their characters, Kennit is still the most piratey pirate ever, and what of Vivacia??? The last few lines before the Epilogue choked me up.

Movies

Heretic (2024)

I saw that this movie was leaving HBO max, and I decided to watch it while getting my steps in one day. The beginning scene compared to the rest of the movie felt unnecessary for me. I love A24 movies usually, but this one wasn’t my favorite. It was just okay, very predictable and had a cookie cutter “scary movie” procession of events.

The Mormons just can’t catch a break, can they?🤣

Companion (2025)

Heretic was my first introduction to Sophie Thatcher, and this was recommended next so I went ahead and watched it. I enjoyed it better than Heretic, it was more original and since I rarely read what movies are about before I watch them, it was fun to be surprised.

Nun (2017)

I was still in the mood for spooky thriller movies, so I decided to watch the first chronological Conjuring universe movie. I thought it was my first time watching it, but as it went on I believe I saw this not too long after it came out. I must have watched it as a RedBox rental with my dad one weekend. I was not a fan. The movie was too dark, I felt like I couldn’t see anything, and it wasn’t really scary.

Annabelle: Creation

This movie was next in the timeline, and I hadn’t seen any Annabelle movies, so I was more excited for this one. This movie was not too dark, it was actually bright and fun to watch. And it was actually scary. That Annabelle doll is so terrifying! I haven’t seen the original Conjuring movies in so long, so I’m curious as to how everything will fit in together since my memory is foggy on the OG plot.

Music

Guys, I really need some new music to listen to. I am not saying this for me, obviously I love my ya’llternative tunes, but it is country, emo, sometimes bass heavy music every month. A lot of the time it’s the same songs and artists over and over.

I need to spend some time branching out again, I used to explore the depths of Spotify’s crazy genre names, but I haven’t done that in a while.

My song of the summer is The Precipice by Jessie Mazin, it has been helping me work through a lot and I love the lyrics.

Tyler Childers isn’t an artist I listen to regularly, but when I do, I tend to listen to a couple of songs on repeat.

Life

Branson

At the very end of July and into the first days of August, I met up with my dad, stepmom, and sister. I drove up to the hotel on July 31st, and the 2 hour drive was pretty peaceful. I got to Branson, Missouri right around sunset.

That weekend was the last weekend of the firework and drone show, so Silver Dollar City was open later than the rest of the year. After I got there, we went to the park and I rode some rides with my sister and we watched the show. The drone show was super cool, but I am kind of suspicious of drones, am I the only one?

It started raining that Friday night, and my stepmom and I couldn’t ride any adult rides, but we had the whole next day to ride any rollercoaster.

Speaking of the next day, we woke up bright and early on Saturday and drove less than a minute up to Silver Dollar City for a full day of riding rollercoasters and enjoying the sun.

My stepmom booked us all an acrobat show at 11:00 am, so after we rode Powder Keg, we waited in line for the show. I have never watched any show at the park, and it was very cute! They juggled, balanced, and juggled while balancing.

My 7 year-old sister discovered her love of Thunderation, the very last season that it ran, and I think we ride it over 10 times that day. It was a lot of fun, and Annistyn and I even rode in the first seats a couple of times. Silver Dollar City is retiring Thunderation and building a new ride next year, so I guess you can’t ride it too many times.

Every day that we were at the park, these colonial dressed talents played a few tunes, such as Yankee Doodle. It’s part of their Summer theme, along with fireworks and a seasonal menu.

After riding ride after ride and walking up and down hills and wait times, we left the park to eat dinner. We went to Mel’s Hard Luck Diner and I got a veggie burger and fries. Every few minutes, a waiter or waitress would sing a song. I took a photo of our waitress singing Part of Your World from the movie The Little Mermaid. She was very talented!

We went back to the park to complete our world record of how many times you can ride thunderation in a row, and with aching feet we walked back to the car and went back to the hotel to sleep.

We woke up on Sunday morning, our last day in Branson, and drove to the park to be the first ones in line for the free tour of Marvel Cave at 10:00 am. Everyone showed up for the tour at the last minute, we watched an introduction video, and off we went with our tour guide.

Throughout the tour you will descend and ascend over 500 steps worth of stairs, the photo below shows the “Cathedral Room”, 300 feet below the entrance of the cave.

The photo below is before descending into the “room”…

And here is the photo of the after. Our guide told us that the first tours were conducted by way of LADDER down into the cave, and they had a candle that lasted two hours for exploration, then they climbed all the way back up the hill and climbed the ladder back to the surface. That was back in the late 1800’s. No thanks!

Our tour guide was great and funny, he was throwing out all kinds of jokes. I always wonder how many of the stories they tell about the happenings of the cave are true and which are just tall tales for entertainment.

We descended ever further down and encountered a cave waterfall, all lit up. The photo makes it look a lot smaller than it was.

Imagine having to navigate this cave just by candlelight back when it was first discovered. Our guide told us that with just the lamplight, someone thought they had found marble down in the cave. They hired a whole team before the geologist came down and said that it wasn’t marble at all, but limestone. Limestone is abundant here in the Ozarks.

It was hard to get clear pictures at times, I was focusing on not slipping and falling lol.

This was the last area we stopped to learn at before we climbed up a whole bunch of stairs and climbed winded into 60 year old trolleys to be brought back up to the surface.

We were told that since they are so old, they are unreliable. There was a chance we would be climbing steep stairs all the way back up! Here’s the photo I took before we all loaded up. I can’t believe we climbed all that way.

I wanted to get a photo of the vehicle, but instead got mugs from my dad and sister, lol. Oops! See how they are tilted? When we climbed into them under the surface, it was so steep that we were leaned back. As we rolled toward the park, the level ground had us hunched forward. I’m glad they angled the exit so that we didn’t have to hobble out.

Overall, it was a super cool experience.

Luckily, all went smoothly and we walked back into the park for lunch and to ride Thunderation one last time.

My sister and I went into Grandpa’s Mansion, which is an illusion building with warped mirrors and tilted floor. Here’s a photo of us standing at 45 degree angles, but I was trying to straighten the camera. I walked out of there with a headache, but I’m glad my sister had a good time.

Froliday Inn

Last month I showed you the guard frogs that I’ve been seeing on the fence when I get home at night. Well, they now have their own Frog Hotel. I already had all of the materials, all I had to do was get some elbows for the PVC pipe and of course, decorations.

Dollar Tree didn’t have any of their fairy garden stuff, sadly, so I just got some Halloween lights. I will be checking for more decorations soon. The Froliday Inn has had a few visitors and one repeat guest! Dylan picked out some mushroom decorations, and we stuck those in beside the pool I made out of some plastic I found around the house, haha.

Dylan’s Birthday

My boyfriend’s birthday was on the 18th, but I had already gotten his main gifts two months in advance!

August 15th was National Thrift Shop Day, and while many second hand stores had sales, my local ones did not. Still, I found Dylan a nice shirt and jeans at Goodwill. I was so focused on making sure there were no stains or rips in the jeans that I accidentally got the wrong size.

It’s okay though, because I already had a new pair for him that actually fit from American Eagle. So he got one pair of jeans that fit, one that didn’t, one shirt, stress relieving eucalyptus body wash (his favorite scent) and some churro cinnamon roll hand wash.

I want to incorporate more second hand gifts during holidays. My mom has been doing it for a while, because I have a love for vintage things and just because she’s cool, but I am still new to thrift shopping for other people. I was nervous, trying to make sure the second hand items were as nice quality as possible and I ended up with a pair of jeans that were two inches too short and two inches too small in the waist, Face palm. Dylan was still happy with everything else.

For his birthday treat I made a cookie “cake” of his favorite, snicker doodle! It is just a sugar cookie baked in a coating of cinnamon and sugar. I always go heavy on the cinnamon and go for brown sugar in the dough.

I also made the icing but it was a bit runny. I am no pro! It tasted amazing, and was baked perfectly as well, so that’s all that matters.

Deprivation Tank

Mom took me to her sensory deprivation tank appointment, and while I was writing about it here, I ended up so long winded that I felt it needed to be its own post, so you can check that out here.

Long story short, I had a good time, and would definitely do it again. We also did Lucia Light Therapy, but I probably won’t do that again. I prefer the darkness!

Extra Bits

I took a photo of Tori’s mushy face on my knees one day. I absolutely love this picture, it is so cute.

There are a lot of bunnies at the back of our yard, and I guess one had their babies under a large pile of branches and twigs beside a tree. I think they are just big enough to leave their nest area, and I took the dogs back inside so that I could take some pictures.

I had my Disney Princess moment when the bunny crawled over and sat on my shoe! How adorable, I wanted to pet it so bad but I didn’t want to scare it away. Their sibling was nearby under the pile of sticks, and I didn’t bother them.

I saw a lunar eclipse at the end of the month, I was in the maximum coverage zone!

Closing

I barely posted this month, so I felt it didn’t make sense to add in the Reader’s Favorite Post. I have a lot planned for the best time of the year, the -ber months! There will be a new theme on my blog, with a new background and header. It has been fun, Medeival Fantasy, and I’m sure we will meet again, but it is time for something new.

Since I’m not a daily writer I have been spending my writing time trying to make it as easy as possible for myself this coming Blogtober. Are you ready?

How was your month? What did you read, write, listen to, or experience? Let me know and I will see you all soon!