Good Things List No.74: North Cascades National Park, Pain Relief, Anti-Bark Device, Books & More

A monthly list of good things to see, buy, read and watch.

Some links in this article are affiliate links and if you click on them I will receive a small commission at no cost to you.

Happy July! Things are fully into summer mode here for us in the Pacific Northwest (finally – see below how we were rained out of our recent trip, lol).

I find it so fun to go through the garden every day and look at what’s growing – this morning it was an onion, a handful of peas, some broccoli and lettuce, along with cutting flowers for a table centerpiece.

We’re looking forward to some sweet family time we have planned this month – at a lake, celebrating birthdays, and having BBQs. It’s that time of the year – I hope you have some good things planned, too!

Good Things List

North Cascades National Park & Stehekin

We took a week long road trip up to the North Cascades National Park in Washington state – about an 8 hour drive northeast for us (7 hours coming home on the west side). It’s one of the least visited national parks because of it’s remoteness and accessibility issues, as the most dramatic views of the “American alps” can only be reached by hours/days long backpacking trips.

However, there’s still a lot of beauty to see even if you are in a car and want to take shorter hikes, like we did.

The North Cascades is actually a complex of the main national park split into a north unit and south unit (divided by the North Cascades Highway), plus two national recreation areas – Ross Lake and Lake Chelan (here’s a map that shows this).

We started at Lake Chelan where we left our car to take a ferry to the end of the lake and the little town of Stehekin, which is the southern part of the North Cascades National Park Complex.

It took a 1.5 hour ferry ride to get to Stehekin Lodge where we stayed, and we started midway up the lake – it’s 50 miles long total! This was the view from the lodge’s deck:

We had a view like this from our room, too, and the weather was lovely the two days we stayed there (highly recommend the lodge – nice rooms and staff, plus good food in the restaurant).

We took a tour to be able to see everything in the short time we were there (you can’t take a car there for visits, though locals do have cars), including a famous 1912 homestead and apple orchard, the one-room log cabin school (and the new one room school still being used), and beautiful Rainbow Falls:

We then boated back down the lake and headed up through the park along Hwy 20, seeing more of the craggy-topped mountains along the way:

We stopped at lookouts and overviews, but didn’t take many photos because we were going to go back the next day to take a few short hikes in the area.

But those clouds you see? The next day they got worse. Bigger and sadly, lower so they obscured all the mountain tops we’d just driven 8+ hours to see. You can even see that the rain we had at the lower level added snow to the tops of the mountains above Lake Diablo:

Yes, while most of the rest of the country was dealing with hot weather and heat domes, lol.

We did take a couple of hikes anyway – here was one up to “Thunder Knob” with a view of the lake – and sometimes mountains:

It was like that for the full two days we had there to hike and see things – and on the second day it rained pretty hard most of the day.

I’m so glad we had that time at the beginning with the good weather – and the whole area was of course very beautiful with lots of interesting little towns to see even with the poor weather (the cute western-themed town of Winthrop stands out). So I do recommend a visit if you ever get the chance!

Pain Relief for Sore Hands

I think I shared this with my newsletter friends a few months ago, but it bears repeating – this essential oil blend actually DOES work on my hands that have ached for a few years when I knit for a while. It’s actually really amazing to me!

But I had to test if it was really working, so I didn’t replace it right away when I ran out. Um, yeah – the pain I hadn’t had in months came back in full force! So I ordered TWO bottles because they were on sale.

It seems crazy to me that this works – I mean, rubbing essential oils on your skin? But the reviews are full of comments from people like me – I won’t be without it again, that’s for sure!

Caveat: My dad has a lot of arthritic pain in his hands as a golfer and he tried this recently and it didn’t work for him like it did for me. So it’s not for everyone, but it’s not expensive and definitely worth a try to see if it works for you, in my opinion.

Yippy Dog Sound Relief

Our little dog, Jynx, has a bark that can just go through you, if you know what I mean – so loud and shrill. And she barks at everyone – even Brian when we comes in the door before she sees him.

What’s worse is that she doesn’t always stop, even when it’s someone she knows well – I literally have to pick her up to get her to stop, which I’m not always able to do, depending.

So when a friend told me about a sound-based anti-barking device that was working for their dog, I bought one to try with our little Jynx. It’s simple and rechargeable, which I prefer (some used 3 AAA batteries, which seems a lot for a small device).

I can report that this really does work to slow her down and stop the loudest barks, though it doesn’t stop her completely – I have to push the button numerous times for her to finally stop. She also doesn’t remember it to not bark as much, like my friend said happened for her dog (she said didn’t even have to use it all the time).

However, I’m glad for any help, and I think it’s totally worth it if you have a dog with this issue, too, since it’s a quick and painless remedy.

June Reads

The Making of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece, Tom Hanks. I enjoyed this a lot – especially as I listened to the audiobook read by Tom Hanks. It’s a story told over time – starting before the second world war – with intertwining characters over a period of more than 50 years that culminate in the making of a movie based on a WWII graphic novel. Obviously, Tom Hanks knows what he’s talking about on a movie set and while some of the technical details flew over my head, it was all super interesting to hear how a movie is made and the issues that can happen. I especially enjoyed the way he tied things together that I couldn’t see at first how they could be related.

Funny Story, Emily Henry. I’ve enjoyed Emily’s other books, though the last one, Happy Place, wasn’t a favorite. This, however, I loved – it may even make my year end list! There was real emotional depth to this (though the scene of her finding out about her fiancé and throwing things at his car was a little too much “movie scene” for me), and I could totally feel how devastated the protagonists were in the beginning. And I thought the progression towards each other was slow, believable and plausible. It definitely pulls at the heartstrings, giving a lot we like in a good romance – laughter, tears, joy, love.

The Women, Kristin Hannah. Well, I’m not sure how to talk about this book. It’s very well written (of course – this author is tried and true) and the characters take a hold of you and you definitely care for them. I can still picture many of the scenes – especially the harrowing Vietnam scenes in the medic outpost. Therein lies my dilemma – it’s kind of a relentless downer with only a sort of hopeful ending…maybe? It’s the story of a young, naive, girl who becomes a nurse and volunteers to go to Vietnam in the first years of the war. Not many good things happen to her, other than the other women friends she meets there. She’s lied to, led on, her loved ones die, then they come back, but they lied to her, and she’s vilified when she returns home. On and on it goes. I don’t have to have all sunlight and roses, and I know that the author wanted to portray what was happening to the forgotten nurses who served – but seriously towards the end I was, like, can nothing good ever happen to this poor character? Ever?

The New Menopause, Mary Claire Haven, MD. This is a needed new book on menopause with more current studies and recommendations for women in all stages of menopause. She clarifies a lot of the confusing stuff that’s come before and offers a really helpful “toolkit” of things to try for the different issues that come with menopause. Her main points are that there need to be many more studies and more money given to women’s health at this stage because the effects of menopause are far reaching and strong – and that HRT is good and needed at certain ages and stages.

Absolution, Alice McDermott. I had this book, set at the beginning of the political issues with Vietnam right before the war, on hold from an online recommendation for months – and it happened to come in right when I finished The Women. I probably wouldn’t choose two Vietnam books in a row, but there it is. This is about the wives of the men who went there first, the intelligence and other military personnel. It was an odd story told in long letters 40+ years later that I had a hard time following for a while. Some of it was disturbing (just the time and how wealthy women treated the natives), some just telling a story but overall I didn’t get any why. There was no closure or “a-ha” moment for me, even in the end. Every time I thought this would be the plot, the reason for the book, the flashback just told another part of the story and nothing really happened.

The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck. I have had this book on my shelf for years. I finally determined to read it on our trip and…hmm, I didn’t really care for it. It won the pulitzer prize for fiction back in 1932 and shares the life of a young farmer in rural China who gets a wife and then chronicles the ups and downs of his life over the next 30 years. He is a hard man, especially to his wife, with only little glimmers of compassion over the years. They go through horrible hardships related to the weather and the failure of crops – and they reach incredible highs, becoming a wealthy family by the end, all because he valued land above most things. Overall I found it was another hard book to read with a sad ending for both the wife and farmer.

Beartown, Fredrik Backman. This is the author of A Man Called Ove, which made one of my best books lists – it was such a good book with hope and love at it’s core. Beartown is not that kind of book – at all. It tells a hard story with hard truths that do not make for a story of much hope, though there is family love that comes through. Beartown is a small, rural, down on it’s luck place where the only hope for town redemption is through hockey (in this way it reminded me of Friday Night Lights). But it goes dark quickly and the way the town turns on the teens involved, putting so much pressure and importance on a game over morality and right-and wrong is hard to read. It has sort of a good ending, resolving some things, but isn’t what I would call happy. (There are two other books that take place here and I’m not interested in reading them.)

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Laurie R. King. This is a 20 year old book (starting a series of 18 books and counting!) that I just discovered. It imagines an older “retired” Sherlock Holmes living in the country, doing experiments, writing and taking care of bees. There he meets a precocious orphaned teen girl who he can see thinks a lot like he does and so embarks on teaching her what he knows. This is told from the girl’s point of view – Mary Russell – from the time she first meets Sherlock through her college years and then cases they get involved in. I enjoyed this and thought the author did a believable job of writing in the style of the Conan Arthur Doyle Sherlock books while keeping the character of Sherlock intact. It was an interesting idea that was done well, though I don’t think I’ll read any of the other books.

Watching

We didn’t watch much last month and didn’t really care for the few things we did. I do want to mention one – Hitman on Netflix – because it’s getting gushing reviews and we DID NOT LIKE THE MESSAGE at all.

Brian and I watched it with our daughter (fast forwarding through the sex scenes, lol) and it was unanimous that we just couldn’t get behind a movie that said killing people to get what you want is okay. Seriously – they kill two people and especially the last one we are suppose to laugh and applaud that they are getting together because of this.

What the what?? Why is no one mentioning this? They kill and then go on to have a great life – we see them with two kids later on, laughing at each other about how they’re going to tell their daughter how they met. Talk about cringe.

It’s terrible and I’m incredibly sad that I keep reading only good things about this – Glen Powell is cute, he does a lot of great impressions – yada, yada.

Some reviewers have likened this to old film noir where an everyman is pulled into crime – but in every one of those movies the moral was that crime doesn’t pay. They always ended up worse than when the movie started.

And this is where we’ve come as a society? Let’s laugh and applaud the people killing people we don’t like? Ugh.

Okay – off my soapbox, this is suppose to be a GOOD things list after all, ha!

That’s it for another addition of the Good Things List!

If you’d like to see more of what I’m enjoying, you can check out all the Good Things Lists here. I’d love to know what you think – if you’ve tried any of these or what you’d recommend. Leave a comment below with your thoughts!

Disclosure: affiliate links in this article will earn commission based on sales, but it doesn’t change your price. Click here to read my full disclaimer and advertising disclosure.