Another month is almost over and I have only now summarised what I have read, watched and done in the previous month. And as a consequence of this, once again, it’s hard for me to remember what I should be talking about here. But because I can be such a completionist, I’ll go ahead and jot down what I can recall.
One thing that sticks out is that June is my birthday-month. Something that has emerged as something of a tradition in my family is for people to make each other birthday cards (I don’t always do this, but just about everyone else does). I got nice things from everyone but there are a couple I wanted to share. This one is from my youngest daughter–we were all pretty impressed by it.
Even more impressive is that if you look carefully there are some Morse code symbols stuck in there which spell the words “Cooking Class”, which was something the kids gave me money to do (but that I haven’t taken advantage of yet).
My oldest daughter gave me this card which unfortunately took some damage from our leaky roof.
It’s a duck, as you can see, because one of my most notable characters that I have created and voiced is Bo, a talking duck. You a listen to him in this episode of The Hanna Jo Stories, amongst other things.
The water damage that that card took reminds me of one of the biggest things that we ended up not doing this past month, which was fixing our roof. We bought a house a few years ago, and ended up in the cheapest house in a nice neighbourhood. In other words, we got it knowing there are things to fix. One of the most obvious after the plumbing (long-time readers know about my extended ditch-digging efforts a while back to address this) is our roof.
After a bunch of hemming and hawing about it, we finally decided to go ahead and have our tile roof replaced completely (the second most expensive thing I’ve ever committed to spend money on). Unfortunately, we did not do this in time to get the work done before the Australian winter’s rains began to set in. So it hopefully will be done sometime in the near future, but it’s not yet. and in the meantime we deal with whatever leaks we deal with whenever we get a hard rain.
Anyway, aside from all that, a bit chunk of my month was spent planning and running two mystery-puzzle games. One featured mostly escape room-style puzzles, and I did the for my friends at my birthday. The other one was more of a murder mystery game, with some escape room puzzle elements, including this makeshift cryptex that I fashioned out of paper cups.
It didn’t magically open when you got the letters into the right position (indicated by what you see here, which is my first name and last initial) but it did reveal a four letter code-word that you needed to advance in the game. I was pretty proud of that one.
Aside from that…what did I actually read or watch this month? That’s the part that is hard to remember.
The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee Stewart
Well, one thing was this book by; a prequel novel to the Mysterious Benedict Society series that was loosely adapted for a Disney+ series that I used to really like. This tells the story of Nicholas Benedict, the eccentric benefactor of the Mysterious Benedict Society, when he was a kid at an orphanage that consistently fails to protect him from bullies or to recognise his extraordinary talents. Nicholas survive thanks to the support of his friends–fellow-orphan John and deaf neighbor Violet, and the dream they all share of being able to solve a series of clues and locate an historical treasure.
Now when I say I read this book last month, what I really mean is that my kids and I finally finished it, after reading it together for years. I don’t know how many years, but it’s been more than a few. I enjoy reading out loud and so even though my youngest two daughters are both adults now, we have had a good time going through it together. But with the busy-ness of life and all the TV series that we tend to enjoy, it often got pushed to the wayside.
But not any longer! We picked it up again recently and got it done! And it was a rich and satisfying story about Nicholas ultimately learning to just to be clever, but to be kind. I don’t know that I can say that I liked it as much as the actual Mysterious Benedict Society books that I’ve read, but it was enjoyable. I think maybe everything that I’ve read by Trenton Lee Stewart has tended a bit towards overlength, but I also don’t know if I can be much of a fair judge given the pace at which we read it! Indeed, I was shocked to finish it and to then realize the whole story takes place just over a few weeks. I felt like it had been a lifetime.
Patience
The other thing I’ll mention here is Patience, a series which for sure we watched some of in June.
Actually, it’s a show I discovered back in January I think, when I came across it somewhere or another, and realized it was a British mystery show about a young female autistic archivist who solves murders! This stands out because one of my daughters is a young female autistic archivist! Although she works for a private Christian school, and not the police, so she hasn’t run into as much murder-related evidence as her TV counterpart (at least, not that we know of).
Anyway, Patience is a good show that is definitely trying to take its premise seriously. Each mystery is dealt with a single episode, but the backdrop is Patience Evans managing the challenges of life, including her relationships with the various police officers she works with and with the fact that her mother walked out on her when she was a child. The ongoing mystery of what happened to her mother isn’t the most interesting thing, but the character-work is interesting.
I showed it to my daughter to see what she’d think of it and she likes it too. She regularly comments on Patience’s experiences and notes how she recognises that one, or she identifies with why Patience did this or that, so I guess that’s also some praise for the series. We’re also in the midst of watching Monk, so often when we sit down to watch something the discussion is which of our neurodivergent detectives we’re going to spend time with this time around.
Patience is played by Ella Maisy Purvis who is apparently also autistic in real life. The original co-lead of the show was Laura Fraser as DI Bea Metcalf, the leader of the police unit that Patience finds herself working with. At the start of the second season, it’s revealed that Metcalf has left York (where the show takes place) and that DI Frankie Monroe, played by Jessica Hynes, has taken her place. Patience’s relationship with Monroe is more tempestuous than her predecessor, which gives the show a different flavor. We’re still in the midst of the second season so we’re still seeing how all that plays out.
The show has been renewed for a third season apparently, which is good news. In a world where the streaming series economy doesn’t always support shows sticking around for multiple seasons, it’s nice that the British still seem to know how to do it.
There are probably some other things like I said, but I can’t remember them at the moment. And since July is getting close to being over, I think it’s time to get this summary of June out there!
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
