(I just) Julyed in your arms tonight
It must've been something I did this month
Trip to Delaware
For my wife’s birthday this year we planned a trip to the beaches of Delaware. We stayed two nights in Rehoboth Beach and two nights with my aunt and uncle in Milton, DE.
On the first day we made the surprisingly short trip straight to Rehoboth Beach but took a last minute detour to Dewey Beach to kill some time before our hotel room was ready.
That night we celebrated my wife’s birthday with a reservation to the sushi restaurant Saketumi. I didn’t think I’d need the reservation, but the place was packed and the food was delicious!
The next day we got up early and went straight to Rehoboth Beach proper. We spent the morning at the beach and had lunch at a pretty decent fish and chips shop on the boardwalk. We then returned to the hotel to freshen up and have a bit of quiet time.
After showers we decided to brave the 98-degree-plus heat and play a round of mini golf. Following that we had dinner at a pizza and craft beer place and returned to the Rehoboth boardwalk to check out Funland, their amusement park. My nephew and I braved the Haunted Mansion (which was kind of lame, but still better than Ocean City, MD).
On the third morning we packed up and checked out of the hotel, heading today to Cape Henelopen State Park for the third unique beach of the trip. Overall this may have been my favorite beach we went to. They had excellent bathrooms and changing rooms/showers. The beach was a more gradual slope into the water and the waves weren’t super strong. The only drawback was, and this was true of all of the beaches this week, that there were jellyfish creeping up on us. My wife and nephew even caught part of one. Ouch!
Later that day we arrived in Milton, DE at my uncle’s place. We basically spent the rest of the day settling in and chillin’ with the fam. My nephew even picked up a bicycle and finally learned how to ride without training wheels! Way to go Jace!!
The next day the weather was pretty cruddy, but we still got to check out the Dogfish Head brewery. It’s a very hip and stylish hangout spot with a really extensive gift shop. We sampled some beers in a flight and then bought a whole bucket of beers and got to take the bucket home! It’s currently one of my son’s favorite toys.
After our lunch outing at the brewery we came home and wasted some time watching TV while my uncle drove back into MD to pick up CRABS FOR DINNER! The feast was delicious and made me proud to be a Marylander. It was the perfect way to end the mini-vacay, for the next morning we packed up shop and headed home.
Movies
Thunderbolts* - I finally watched this when it came to Disney+. It was a perfectly fine distraction with just enough fun, laughs, and heart.
The Phoenician Scheme - Watched this half-distractedly with the wife and mostly enjoyed it, but I think I’ll need to sit down and watch it again to understand wtf was going on.
Superman - Excellent superhero movie that brings back the comic book sentiment of just being a good time without too much baggage. David Corinswet nails it as Superman, but Nicholas Hoult is a pitch-perfect whiny and petty Lex Luthor.
The King Tide - This one was an indie blind watch for me. It follows a small isolated Newfoundland island community that enters a civil war of sorts concerning a baby girl with mystical powers that washes ashore. It’s played very realistically and understated, but was a bit too slow to unravel.
The Rule of Jenny Pen - Quite possibly one of the most bizarre relatively mainstream movies I’ve ever seen. John Lithgow and his creepy hand puppet terrorize Geoffery Rush and other residents at an assisted living facility. Things start off extremely unsettling and disturbing but end up spinning wheels as the movie peters out. I wish I liked this one more than I did because John Lithgow gives one of the most sinister villain performances of his career.
TV
King of the Hill - With the reboot on the horizon, my wife and I have been powering through the original run of the show. We’re currently on season 3 and almost every episode is great in one way or another. RIP Jonathan Joss and Chuck Mangione.
City the Animation - From the creators of one of my favorite comedy anime Nichijou comes another show in the same slice-of-life vein. I’m three episodes in and it’s enjoyable but hasn’t hit the same heights as its predecessor, mostly due to the lack of memorable and relatable characters.
Vidyagames
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4 - This one is a blast from my past and a no-brainer for my Switch 2. I’ve already plowed through the THPS3 campaign and am now making my way through THPS4 and the nostalgia waves are taking me out. The updated soundtrack rocks too, with added music from King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Mastodon, and Turnstile.
Donkey Kong Bananza - Mario Kart World aside, this is the game that is going to sell a whole lot of Switch 2’s. It’s basically a spiritual successor to Super Mario Odyssey in that it’s a collect-a-thon of a bunch of “banandium gems” akin to the Mario’s moons. Almost everything is completely destructible (up to a point), which activates some kind of latent mild OCD in my brain, causing me to waste unfathomable amounts of time crushing everything to smithereens.
Tabletop
So Clover - This is a cooperative word game that I played a few times this month. Each player gets a set of ring-shaped cards that fit onto a clover-shaped board so that 4 sets of two word pairs are formed (picture provided to make up for my inability to articulate what this game is).
Each player then secretly thinks of a word that can be associated with each of these pairs and then removes and mixes up all of the word cards in secret. It is then the rest of the team’s job to take and rotate/affix the ring cards back on the board so that each handwritten word is matched up with its associated word pair. The more successfully this can be done for each player, the higher the cooperative score.
I found this game pretty good for a quick chuckle as you try to get inside the headspace of your friends and see how it is their connect their dots. It kind of fills the same place as something like Just One or a reverse, cooperative Codenames.
River Valley Glassworks - I picked up the deluxe edition of this game at my local store because of the neat components and cute art style. The game here basically consists of set collection and drafting reminiscent of but much more thematic than Azul. Players gather river stones of varying colors and shapes and deposit them in a storage grid that later dictates your score. In essence, you want to gather many different stones in different colors, but not so many as you run out of board space (either too many colors, or too many of the same color). Which stones you can collect are dictated by the shape of the stones in your pan, but it’s the color that ultimately matters for scoring.
When I first started playing this I was immediately let down in a “that’s it?” kind of way. But as the game neared to a close I started to see glimpses of the strategy and how to manipulate the board to maximize your score. As I mentioned at the start, this game is basically 90% similar to Azul, but likely gets a slight edge for newer players due to its theme and approachability. As for actual game mechanics and strategy, I would probably recommend Azul instead.
Cities - I’ll briefly mention this here because we finally completely one of the games on our 10 x 10 challenge (which I talked about in my first Substack blog post). Finishing the 10 plays for Cities basically came down to mad dash because both me and my wife were utterly tired of playing this game. It played decently enough at 2 players, but the variety of strategy from game to game just was not there. And it typically took about as long to set up for a new round as it did to play said round, which was grating to say the least. This game is definitely going in my SELL pile.
Looks like your July was busy and fun-filled! You’re lucky you’re able to catch so many movies, I think I missed out on about 5 years of entertainment when my kids were tots! Those were the old, old times back in the last century!
Great times! Exhausting times!