Angela Law

animal lover, gardener, knitter, and gourmet cook
 
books

freedom of the mask

This was the latest book in Robert McCammon’s Matthew Corbett series. It started off a little slow, but picked up some steam at the end. And, it ended with a major cliffhanger, so I’m looking forward the the next book, whenever that might be released. I feel like the first couple of books were better than the later ones, but they are all still worth a read. I wonder how many books are planned for the series–this was the 6th one and I’m starting to feel like things need to wrap up soon.

My rating: 3.5/5

movies

monsters

I saw this movie listed on a “must see” article about Netflix and it piqued my interest so I watched it last night. The movie centered around the effects of an alien invasion, which took place six years before the story started, and which was contained to a single area near the US/Mexico border. There were only two main characters in the movie, a photographer who was in Mexico to photograph alien-related activity, and the daughter of the photographer’s boss (and I have no idea why she was in Mexico). Anyway, the photographer is recruited to escort the daughter back to the US and getting there is pretty much the story.

For a low budget production, this was pretty good.

My rating: 3.5/5

health & wellness

acl

Jake’s knee has been bothering him on and off since he sprained it in July, so I took him to his pediatrician’s office last week. They recommended seeing an ortho, which we did today. Unfortunately, he has a torn ACL, which will need to be surgically repaired. He’s getting an MRI next week to make sure there isn’t any other damage and then he has a follow-up appointment in a couple of weeks with the ortho. We’ll get things scheduled at that point. He will definitely need time off from school and work, and as you can imagine, he’s not very happy about all of this.

movies

deadpool

I don’t like superhero movies, with the exception of the Iron Man series. They take themselves too seriously (whereas Iron Man was pretty funny). I heard this movie was also funny, so I figured I’d give it a shot. Not my kind of humor, though. The plot was interesting enough, but overall I was disappointed in the film. I guess I’m in the minority, but that’s how it goes.

My rating: 3/5

gardening & landscaping

bad to worse

So, the hedge situation…the rest of the hedges were removed last weekend and it looks even worse than we anticipated. We had some things up against the hedges (rock pile, compost bin, etc.). It looked fine before, but now it looks like we have a bunch of garbage sitting in the middle of the yard.

Brian took care of the rock pile by putting in a dry rock foundation around the shed (the shed is raised off of the ground and the ground slopes, so there was a pretty big space between the bottom of the shed and the ground on three sides). It looks amazing! I don’t know why we didn’t think of this idea before. And almost all of the rocks were used in its construction, so that takes care of one problem.

We’re going to move the compost bin to the garden area. This means I will be losing one of my raised beds to accommodate it, so that is disappointing. The bed is currently planted, so we won’t be able to move it till the fall.

Lastly, we’ve decided that we don’t trust the neighbor to plant new hedges in a timely manner, so we’re going to plant a number of evergreen trees this fall. It’s not going to be a whole row of them–just enough to block the view of their patio. Next spring, we’ll fill in with some additional plants (hostas, grasses, etc.). With the sale of our house looming in the near future, we need to fix what we can ourselves.