No. 11: A Summer Bucket List
Plus guerrilla gardeners, Jury Duty, and happy places
I’m currently en route to the east coast for a friend’s wedding and our first wedding anniversary (we’re going to Charleston!), and I’m SO looking forward to the heat and, dare I say, the humidity. California has been unseasonably gray and cold this year; we’ve yet to have a real summer’s day.
There’s something about east coast summers that feels especially summery. The thickness of the air. Heat that lingers after sundown. Fireflies. The fact that you never, ever need a sweater. (Wearing a linen dress and sandals at nighttime is pure bliss!) Even the storms feel summery.
In anticipation of this trip—which I’m dubbing our *official* summer kick-off—I was inspired to put together a seasonal bucket list. Here are all the things I want to do this summer, some things I want to do every summer, and some things that, if I don’t do them, it just won’t feel like summer at all.
Make s’mores around a campfire
Swim in a lake
Read an Elin Hilderbrand novel (which I’ve heard are very beachy) and see what all the fuss is about
Go on a really long hike, then have a really cold beer
Go to an outdoor concert
See the Barbie movie!
Make jam and gift it to our new neighbors (Andrew and I are moving house in July!)
Buy an outdoor dining table and chairs, and hang string lights in our garden; host a dinner party al fresco using said outdoor furniture
Grill burgers and make margaritas
Perfect my recipe for a rustic galette with stone fruit
Lay in a hammock
Buy 1-2 swimsuits that will last longer than a single season
Have a pool day
Eat an ice cream cone
Travel somewhere new (this is the first thing I’ll be checking off the list: Charleston, here we come!)
And now for June’s smorgasbord:
⚖️ Jury Duty: The Office meets The Truman Show, but make it jury duty. The premise is this: Everyone on the show is an actor except for one juror, Ronald Gladden, who thinks that it’s a real trial and that he’s partaking in an educational documentary about jury duty. Improv mixes with planned and increasingly wild comic bits—an inept lawyer, “chair pants,” t-shirts with a (fake) rallying cry for white supremacists, a clogged toilet, soaking… Equal parts hilarious and heartwarming, this 8-episode series on Amazon Prime only works because Ronald is such an earnest, stand-up dude. Andrew and I both loved it.
💖 Happy Place by Emily Henry: Emily Henry does it again. This romance novel takes place in a quaint town in Maine, where a group of three couples and longtime friends gather annually—except this year, one of the couples has broken up and neglected to tell the others. They pretend to still be together for the sake of the group and, of course, things heat up. Of Emily Henry’s novels, I still like Beach Read the best, but this one surpassed Book Lovers to take second place. A breezy, fun, and (key word today) summery read.
🌱 Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton: I enjoyed Eleanor Catton’s first Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Luminaries, and was excited to dive into her next. Birnam Wood is the name of a (fictional) New Zealand-based grassroots collective of guerrilla gardeners who plant crops in public and abandoned spaces and distribute their harvest. One of the founding members gets involved in a business deal with a sketchy billionaire, and the results are catastrophic. The book has a long ramp and took me a while to get into, but Catton’s writing is so mellifluous and fun to read that I stuck with it. The last 150 pages are propulsive, and the end will shock you.
🎓 Never Have I Ever: The final season! :( I’ve loved this Mindy Kaling-created Netflix series since it first came out (I pretty much love any high school/coming-of-age story, lol). I found this last season very satisfying (except one detail that I won’t give away, but listen to this NPR review and you’ll hear it). Overall, a joy.
👗 The Great: Just discovered this clothing brand, and their dresses are so lovely!
I’ve been delinquent on @books.to.cook this month, and now I’m traveling for a week, gah! But I plan / hope to make it up the last week of June. It’ll be a week of nonstop cocktails! So let’s all look forward to that…
xo,
Claire