Angela Law

animal lover, gardener, knitter, and gourmet cook
 
books

finders keepers

I was very excited to get this new Stephen King book. It is the second of three in the Mr. Mercedes series. I thought it was going to be a continuation of the first book, but it was a new story (not entirely, though–there were ties to the plot of the first book and some of the same characters were in this one, but they were not the primary focus).

I had trouble getting into it, but things picked up at the end. It did take me about a month to read, which probably tells you all you need to know (I normally tear through Stephen King books in a week).

My rating: 3.5/5

pets

lumpy

Alice had a large growth removed from her lip a little over a year ago…and now it’s back. It’s like it came out of nowhere. I don’t know how that happens.

She has not seen the vet about this yet as we’re not sure what we’re going to do about it. Given her general health and age, I’m not sure that another surgery is appropriate. We’re just going to wait and see for a bit before we make any decisions.

gardening & landscaping

fungus among us

My tomatoes were looking good…until yesterday. The fungal problem I’ve seen (for a number of years running) has returned. It’s no wonder with all of the rain we’ve been getting. So, once again, I won’t be getting many tomatoes from the garden. The good news is that we planted some tomatoes in pots and, so far, they are disease-free.

My pepper plants are looking pretty sad, too. I’m blaming the rain for this, as well.

On the positive side of things (besides the fact it hasn’t been super hot), I planted onions from plants (rather than sets) and harvested my first batch this week. They were a respectable size, which is what I was hoping for. I’d like to have a bunch to store over the winter, so I’m off to a good start. Everything else seems to be performing as expected.

gardening & landscaping

the weeds

I haven’t been able to spend much time in the yard/garden these past few weeks due to all of the rain we’ve been getting (nor did we get to do any additional Thunder activities last weekend–Saturday was awful!) and now everything is overrun with weeds. I always say that the majority of my gardening time is spent weeding, but this is ridiculous.

But, if there’s one good thing to be said about cooler, rainy weather, it’s that the water hyacinths in my pond really seem to like it. The new fish we bought are thriving as well. And, I love the new pond filter–the self-cleaning feature is really nice. I should have purchased it years ago.

movies

still alice

This was a really great movie. In it Julianne Moore played a linguistics professor who develops early onset Alzheimer’s. Not surprisingly, she won an Academy Award for her portrayal–it was that good. It’ll have you Googling the symptoms of early onset Alzheimer’s for sure (if not, you’re a better hypochondriac than I). It had some other hefty cast members as well–Alec Baldwin played her husband and Kristen Stewart (who was surprisingly not annoying) played one of her daughters.

Brian doesn’t normally go for depressing movies, but even he liked this one. The only complaint from both of us is that the ending was open-ended. I see this more and more in books and movies, but my preference is for some closure. I mean, you wrote the story, so finish it!

My rating: 4/5