Someone here in Dunwich flipped the Winter/Summer switch and now instead of shivering under a mountain of blankets at night I’m throwing off the sheet and turning on the ceiling fan. Well, that’s as it should be. Summer is brief and anything in the eighties is okay by me.
Camera Girl and I have been planting vegetables and a few flowers. But today I finally ordered some thornless red raspberry plants for her. She is a thrifty woman which I guess I should be grateful for but sometimes it paralyzes her if prices outrage her internal value measuring mechanism. Somehow, she thinks people shouldn’t charge money for plants. When this hesitancy goes on for too long, I step in and buy whichever choice I think she’d like to have the most. Otherwise, she’d end up missing the season and be unhappy which would go against my internal value measuring mechanism.
Currently I’m studying the vagaries of lag bolt, pilot hole diameter as it relates to the designation of hard vs. soft wood. I have been collecting the hardware I need for the latest battle in the war on decay. Current my side is losing. If the rain holds off tomorrow, I will venture out with sledge hammer, drill, hex driver and steely determination to set the world straight again. Or at least several fence posts.
I consider this foray a proof of concept. If successful, this will pave the way for a permanent solution to my fence problems. If it fails, I must contemplate drastic measures involving steel posts and concrete which would be expensive and extremely time consuming. But, ever the optimist, I refuse to even consider the possibility of defeat.
Camera Girl has been spotting critters around the yard. She and the hounds have cornered some frogs and toads. And yesterday she spotted a snake in her garden. Her description was puzzling. It was about a foot long and relatively thin but she said it was solid yellow.
We had a complete lack of garter snakes in the yard last year which was highly unusual. I theorized that a warming event in the middle of the winter might have awakened the garter snakes and caused them to fail to survive the subsequent cold snap that followed. Anyway, Camera Girl’s description sounded like an extremely unusual color and pattern for a garter. I speculated that it was some kind of aberrantly light phase of the brown snake of which we have a generous number here. I claimed skepticism of her description but she reminded me that I’m color blind so I deferred to her chromatic superiority. I will search out this strange creature at some point.
So, I’m mostly enjoying the Summer of Dopey Joe. Despite suffering through the annoyance of dealing with unreliable appliances from China and shortages of spare parts due to the “supply chain breakdown” I am still mostly cheerful. Of course, if rolling blackouts become the outrage of the month in August that would tick me off. But it would also give us a shot at winning some of the New England states in November. And that would be an especially sweet cherry on top of the schadenfreude parfait. There are hints of congressional and senate seats that might flip. These would be transitory gains. New England is permanently blue. The people live at the center of the Cathedral. But if just for a moment, as some sort of involuntary reflex, they vote for a Republican it would be a barometer of the depths of incompetence of the Biden Administration and a harbinger of disaster for the Democrats in 2024.
And that’s something I always want to celebrate. Now where is that sunscreen?
With the current price of treated limber, concrete filled and braced galvanized steel posts may not be that much more.
Good point.