7-Quick takes

 This content uses referral links. Read our disclosure policy for more info. This means if you make a purchase, I get a little change to keep up my Diet Coke habit. It’s a win/win. 

1.  Rosie ran in an annual 4th of July 5K, but this time she did it as a high school student running with her high school team. She did a great job and even won a 2nd place ribbon for her age group. Hopefully, this will be a great season for her. 

2. Then at night, we walked down to see the fireworks. Akron put on a pretty good show and the fireworks boomed for 20 straight minutes!

3. Noah is enjoying his internship for the county. For the first few weeks he was faithfully filing culvert inspections. Who knew that the county had so many inspections to file!

Lately he’s been scanning some kind of plans and filing those too, from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Last week, he came to work and found that they had put a little sign up on his cubicle. It’s nice to be appreciated!

4. We bricked in our little backyard this summer. Long time readers will remember that our poor yard took quite a beating from our four sons. Nary a blade of grass survived their childhood of playing back there. 

We tried sod one year. We tried special grass seed for shady yards. Nothing worked. So we just gave up and bricked it in and I think it looks great. 

Here are some of the very old bricks Mr. Pete procured from projects going on around the city where they were replacing old bricks. We like the historical look of them. 

This is what the whole area looks like now!  We have a table and chairs too, and this weekend Mr. Pete is going to hang some lights. 

 This content uses referral links. Read our disclosure policy for more info. This means if you make a purchase, I get a little change to keep up my Diet Coke habit. It’s a win/win. 

Outside My Window

5. I had the strangest thing happen on Instagram this month. In seven days I gained over 100 followers, but I didn’t do anything differently. I didn’t promote, use different hashtags or anything. The strange thing was that the majority of these new followers had absolutely nothing in common with me. I try to follow people who follow me, but I like my Instagram feed to be full of beautiful, uplifting things. I don’t need it for debate or disagreement; I have Twitter and Facebook for that!

It’s been about two weeks now and I have lost about 40 of those followers. Maybe I’ll lose the rest of them this week. Easy come, Easy go.

6. Amazon Prime day is July 15 and 16. I’m putting together some lists of my favorite things next week.

I will say that my favorite purchase off of Amazon this year so far has been my elliptical.

I use it several times a week. It’s fast, easy and affordable. It was a little bit of a pain to put together, but if you have someone handy with his own tools, you can get it together in about an hour. I’ll be watching to see if these go on sale during Prime Day!

7. Bravewriter Expository and Persuasive Classes are open for Enrollment.

It will cover things like:

• paraphrase
• thesis statement generation
• how to select points and particulars
• structuring an essay
• finding and using research in your writing
• incorporating writing voice into academic writing

Brave Writer specializes in helping students to make the transition from creative, personal experience writing to the academic formats.

If your student is already an experienced writer, this might be the ticket to making that jump into more academic writing.