Another July and its annoying fireworks down. Things were much more lively in the neighborhood this year for the 24th over the 4th. Fireworks were going off Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday for the 24th. Not sure why it was so much worse this time around. 😒

I’ve been looking into some alternatives to Audible lately. There’s been an interesting tiff going on between author Brandon Sanderson and Amazon’s Audible division for audio books. He’s called them out on their pretty deplorable gouging of authors, especially independent authors. Not going to go into the details here, but I’ve never liked that they lock all of their stuff behind DRM and you can just lose access to something you’ve purchased down the road. (Which has happened to me for several books on Audible.)

• First, I’m using Libby for library books. This has been great for my book clubs, if I can get the book on time.
• I’ve signed up for an account with Libro.fm for my future audio book purchases. You can choose a local bookstore and they will send them a portion of your purchases. Best yet, you can download any book you purchase as an MP3 file with NO DRM!
• Finally, I’ve installed the Smart Audiobook Player app on my phone. Over the last 10+ years Brook and I purchased several hundred audio books through audible and I’ve downloaded and converted all of them to MP3 files. This will let me listen to any books on my phone without using the Audible app. 😁

Part of Audible’s monopoly is their requirement books be exclusive to them if the author wants to make more on the book, so I’ll probably never be completely free of them.

I discovered this little bit of fun a couple of weeks ago:

It’s such a weird spot for a puncture! Because it’s on the side like that it couldn’t be patched, the tire needed to be replaced. The car is 4 years old, but only has about 28k miles on it. Being all-wheel-drive you can’t really replace just one of them, it can cause some weird traction and whatnot. Fortunately, it was holding pressure just fine – even with this nail in it.

The in-town quote I got was over $1,000 to replace all 4 tires, yikes! I did some research and found https://SimpleTire.com and decided to give them a try. I found a good mid-tier tire for about $136 per tire, over $100 less local quote. As part of the purchase you select a tire store in your area for the tires to be delivered to and pay for the install up front as part of your overall purchase.

I’m happy to report it worked great! Did take about a week to get it all done, so not really an option if you need replacements NOW, but I’d recommend them as alternative to local prices!

We finished the Icewind Dale D&D campaign at the end of July, what a wild campaign! You know it’s not your typical D&D campaign when you’re running around with stun guns, laser pistols, and grenades fighting “The Predator” alien as well as the alien from the movie “Alien”! We were in some pretty epic fights and now it’s my turn to start up the next campaign with everyone starting over again at level 1 for their character. I’m a bit intimidated by that. 😅 It’ll be fun though, it’s all about the journey. 😁

I’m sorry to say I saw Oppenheimer at the IMAX theater opening weekend. I fell for the hype and set my expectations too high. It doesn’t really need to be seen on the IMAX, or even in the theater for that matter. I expected a lot more footage from actual bombings and such, but it’s 95% dialog and can wait until it’s on a streaming service. Especially since it’s 3 hours long!

That’s about it, here’s a couple of cute pup pics:

Nyx just checking up on what’s going on in the house.

This is a screenshot from my phone and the security camera in the guest room. Looks like Jax is actually resting his head on the wood blind in the back there. 😆