Tag: New England Summer

All in All, Very Entertaining

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Ah, July First.  The end of winter here in Dunwich and the season of heat and oppressive humidity.  Glorious!  All week the grandkids have been swimming around in the pool which mercifully opened this year without a leak in the liner.  Last year ended with two patches applied and a warning that when winter ended it might be time to replace the liner; a very expensive and difficult procedure that would tax the almost non-existent competence of our local pool professional (and I use this word extremely facetiously) to its limit and beyond.  I told Matt, the pool guy. that I would think about replacing it in September.  But I’m not sure.  I might roll the dice again in 2027.  We’ll see.

I’m off from work for the next week and a half and I’m almost as giddy as a school boy on the first day of summer.  I walked around and checked the milkweed to see if any monarch caterpillars were chewing on the leaves.  While I didn’t find any, I did see a monarch butterfly flitting around the yard and took that as a good sign.  I also haven’t seen any preying mantis egg sacs or baby mantids anywhere and am starting to believe that the mantids that I bought the last few years aren’t capable of surviving the Dunwich winter.  I’ll have to look into that.  I have seen them naturally occurring in the area but I was hoping that my seeding of the area with egg sacs would have made them more prevalent.

Camera Girl has now completely conditioned her pond fish to expect a feeding at about six in the evening after our dinner.  Tonight when she arrived at the pond the water was already in motion and when she tossed in the food pellets it reminded me of what used to happen on the old Addams Family television show when Morticia would toss a leg of lamb into the piranha tank and the fish would roil the water for a few moments and a glistening white bone would be ejected at high speed out of the tank stripped clean.  That’s kind of like what her pond looks like at feeding time.  The damn things actually make audible noise.  I wouldn’t want to be an innocent grasshopper or cricket that accidentally fell into that death trap at feeding time.  It’s slightly unnerving.

I’m currently using my push mower to cut the grass in the fields and it’s taking many hours.  I’ve been too unmotivated to change the oil on the riding mower so I’m paying for my laziness.  But I figure it’ll help me achieve my summer weight loss goal.  If nothing else I’m definitely sweating off an enormous amount of water which must be good exercise for my sweat glands.  I noticed that I was having to double cut the grass to get it right.  But then I discovered that pulling it backward over the grass did a much better job so I dragged the mower behind me backward all the time.  Of course, you can only use one arm when dragging it behind you, so I came up with a routine to alternate arms.  And that had its own subtleties.  All in all, hand mowing was very entertaining.  A good first day of summer.

Reactions

Ed Brault 

It looks like New England is getting even more heat than here in South Carolina. I do remember a few HOT summers up in Danvers, and sweltering near DC when I was in college. Here we just expect it, do the yardwork before the Sun clears the trees, and keep in the shade and A/C until dusk.
If you think your wife’s fish pond look like the Addams Family, you should see the Great Ocean Tank at the SC Aquarium. 50 species totaling 550 various sized critters from all levels of the Food Chain, roiling the waters as we toss sixty pounds of mackerel, squid, shrimp, and smelt on the surface. The sharks are polite, they know they will have a separate dining service an hour later. Our 240-pound sea turtle, on the other hand, is the Diva of the Tank, and even the feeding frenzy parts before her as she glides over for her smelt-cicles (she loves it frozen, nice and crunchy). We do NOT have divers in the water at feeding time, although we do occasionally have to go in to recover a Chum Bucket that got loose from its line.

 

TomD

Goodbye Summer 2025

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So, Saturday (09AUG2025) is a big family party at the Compound.  Another grandson graduates from high school and begins college.  The next, next generation become adults and have all the same decisions and experiences in front of them.  And Camera Girl and I continue our campaign to get to play with progressively more distant descendants.  The hunt for great grandchildren is now the thing.

But the main thing is that I’m just providing the infrastructure; the indoor and outdoor venue and the grill.  The graduate’s parents will bring and cook the food and organize the kids’ activities and lifeguard the pool.  I’ll just be one of the kids tomorrow.  I intend to spend a portion of the event with my brothers talking about how passing the torch to the next generation feels for them.  There has been a threat of putting on a Shatner-Khan adjacent event.  Maybe put on one of his greatest hits.  If it happens, I hope it’ll be “Terror at 20,000 Feet.”  There can be nothing more definitively Shatner than that.

But I hope to spend most of the day eating burgers and dogs and potato salad and peppers and sausage.  And then playing pool with the grandkids and shooting the breeze with family that I don’t see very often.  This will be the last get together for the summer.  And everyone is getting older and travelling even the modest distances between us becomes more challenging every year.  So, these parties become more important.

I guess most of us are on the Trump train so there will be some Trump gloating going on.  We’ll keep it sotto voce because even among my close relatives there are a few folks of the other persuasion.  And I don’t see any need to start a fight.  Family solidarity is more important than scoring political points at a party.  That’s for sure.

A couple of days ago the goofy looking weather man on the Spectrum channel (my cable provider) told us that it looks like a very nice week with temperatures in the 80’s, low humidity and plenty of sun.  But then, just to prove he’s a jerk he went into a little spiel where he defined just how much daylight we lose over the course of August.  And just to show that he was intentionally spreading misery he finished off by saying, “But most people don’t like to be reminded of this sad fact.”  What a creep.

But he’s right.  The sun is lower in the sky.  It’s cooler than a few weeks ago and the sun is down earlier than it should be.  The leaves are starting to fall from the cherry trees.  The vegetable garden is definitely looking worse for wear and the flowers are starting to exhaust.  Last week the daylilies in the sheltered corner ran out of flowers.  There are still some smaller ones (Stella de Oros and orange ones) but they’re not the same.  The cone flowers will last a good long time but there aren’t anymore new flowers growing.  The only flowers still to come are the Montauk daisies and the wolfbane in October.

So summer is wrapping up.  The kids go back to school in two weeks and pretty soon the end of season Dunwich Fair with its First Selectman dunk tank (win at your own risk) and free werewolf neutering clinic will be upon us.  Well, it’s time for the party and goodbye Summer 2025.

I Feel Like a Phoenix Rising Over Arizona

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The suffering is over.  The waiting is over.  The only thing I have left to do this week is get the oil changed on my car.  I can read, write, watch movies, sit in a hammock in the shade (well, if I had a hammock), write poetry (not good poetry), plot the overthrow of the Dunwich town government, laugh in the face of death, learn to play the piano; you name it!

Great Caesar’s ghost!  I’m exhausted just reading that list.

So, emerging from my forced isolation I see that nothing of note has happened in the last five days.  The endless jousting between the press and the Trump administration continues and Trump slowly accumulates small victories from the courts and larger ones from the Supreme Court.  Good!  I’ve declared victory (for the most part) and allow the world to slowly become Trumpified while I get on with my agenda.

I finished my re-read of the last third of my book and came to a few conclusions:

  • I like the writing. I like the way it reads.
  • I like the story line. It moves forward.
  • There is something missing to allow the story to end satisfyingly for all the threads of the book.
  • So, the good news of the first two points makes it worthwhile for me to tackle the bad news of the last point.

As I earlier stated it was weird to read the book after a good long time and read it as if I wasn’t the writer.  Of course, I knew the plot but the writing seemed fresh to me, like I was reading it for the first time.  Now, I did make some edits and even made some small changes to the wording during this read.  But I’m good with what’s already done.  So, I’ll kick around a few ideas to see which one makes the ending most satisfying.  Good.

The summer has gotten amazingly hot and humid.  And this has drawn the grandchildren to want to swim in the pool.  And this year the water is perfect.  Perfectly clear.  No algae.  Good pH.  No leaks.  There are a few small cracks in the liner above the water line.  So, I bought a patching kit and I will attempt to fix them myself.  If I botch it, I’ll call in the professionals and they’ll overcharge me but make the problem go away.  But it’s good to see this expensive hole in the ground get used by someone who can enjoy jumping in and swimming around.  I think in the fourteen years I’ve live here I’ve gone in once.  Oh well.

So, let’s see where Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is in a few days and where the various wars are in a few weeks.  But I’m ready to enjoy the seasonal weather and do some cooking out with friends and relatives and enjoy the only true summer month in the otherwise blighted New England calendar.  Because remember, July is the only month in which measurable snow has not fallen in southern New England.  That makes it sacred.  Enjoy.

Summer Solstice 2025

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June 20, 2025 at 10:42 PM EDT is the Summer Solstice.  This is a point of inflection for my year.  For the last couple of months, the longer days temporarily color my mood brighter.  Added to this is the knowledge that the days are still getting even longer.  Even if the weather is often not optimal, I revel in the astronomical ascendancy of the Sun.

But starting on June 21st the days will be growing shorter.  Now granted this is the fairest time of the year.  The sun is tropical and the heat sears into my soul.  And this is like an elixir of youth for my tired old bones.  But psychologically I recognize that the rollercoaster has reached the top of the highest peak and for a split second it is poised between rising and falling.  Just long enough for us to look around and see heaven around us just before the bottom drops out of the ride and we plummet back to Earth.

And so, for the next two months I drink in every photon of sunlight and revel in kids free from school and looking to fill up their time with play.  I see that there’s a new Superman movie coming out soon.  Maybe it’s a woke nightmare.  Maybe Superman is a Biden/Harris supporter.  But maybe he’s still fighting for truth, justice and the American way.  I’ll find out.  And if it’s any good I’ll bring the kids.  We’ll spend way too much money on lousy popcorn and watery soda.  But We’ll get to debate the strengths and weaknesses of the 2025 son of Krypton.  Who knows, maybe he’ll surprise me.  Or maybe we won’t see it because the reviews are terrible.  But we’ll find stuff to do.

I have a feeling this is the summer we do some fishing.  Dunwich is mostly soggy so there are plenty of lakes and ponds full of what pass for bass and trout.  I think I can get most of them to cast a line in the water.  I haven’t been fishing in twenty-five years.  That’s a long time.  I think it’s time I did.

Objectively speaking, I’m a relic.  I’m much closer to the end of my life than the beginning and now I can actually feel it.  Even maintaining my present vitality requires discipline and work.  And even that is a matter of delaying the inevitable.

And yet, every day is a gift.  We interact with our fellow creatures and try to be useful and positive.  Encouraging the young and facilitating the efforts of those trying to make it a better place.  Those are things that even a relic can accomplish.

So, here’s the official beginning of Summer 2025.  I will do my darndest to make this a successful season for me and Camera Girl and the rest of the clan.  I’m looking forward to all of my rituals and all of the little joys of summer.  Barbecues, local baseball, fireworks, the Dunwich Fair, Fourth of July, Labor Day and all the rest.  We’ll make sure we feel the sun before it retreats back into the hell that is New England Winter.

At least, that’s my plan.  Enjoy.

Pools and Fools

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Just to let me know what she thinks of my July as the end of New England summer theory, Mother Nature has been laying on the torrid heat and drenching humidity.  ¡Ay, Chihuahua!

Fine.  I glory in the heat.  Although it did make a moving job, I was stuck with a wonderful excuse to sweat like a pig.  Well, that’s what showers are for anyway.  Today I got the swimming pool back in line.  We’ve spent the last two months trying to find a leak that has been draining about 700 gallons of water a day.  I was getting ready to switch pool companies when they sent their heavy hitter back with a mandate “to make the crazy old guy happy.”  Well, whine bitterly enough and you get some action.  So, after convincing myself that the leak is at least 80% fixed I refilled the pool from my poor abused well and adjusted pH, chlorine and added the algaecide and voila, Princess Sack of Potatoes has a cool place to splash around in for the week.

Camera Girl will be in full charge next week because I will be incommunicado.  Tonight, I will load up the photos and quotes needed to get me through the next week and a half.  Then tomorrow I’ll try to get a couple of posts done ahead of time to minimize the dead air on the site.  If I’m lucky World War III will break out and spare me the annoyance (bad joke).  But maybe they’ll be some really big news that will make it easy for me to generate copy.

I read that Trump is talking about debating Kamala on Fox News.  Now wouldn’t that be a hoot!  If there weren’t any ringers in the moderators to protect her, I imagine Kamala would come off sounding like a mental patient.  I mean she is a mental patient and without a teleprompter or someone to keep Trump from attacking all her weak spots she just might run off the stage screaming by the ten-minute mark.

As I posted on earlier, Zelensky is now preparing his countrymen for the reality that they will have to come to terms with Moscow.  Putin is laying claim to all the areas with majority Russophone populations which I think is about 30% of the Ukrainian land area.  And he is demanding the neutering of the Ukrainian army, along with a constitutional amendment forbidding NATO membership.

Along with Zelensky’s fear that Donald Trump will cut off his weapons supply, the recent Russian success along the combat line in Donetsk and the difficulty his army is having locating and keeping recruits is bringing home to Zelensky that pretty soon the current terms that Putin wants may look like a bargain a year from now if his military collapses and the Russians can walk into Kiev.

Well, you never know how a war will turn out but it is starting to look like Joe Biden’s war is coming to a disastrous end.  But naturally, for Biden that would be par for the course.

What a shame that the Democrats have made home ownership an impossibility for millions of young couples who want to start a family.  You’d think for that reason alone, the Zoomers would all vote for Trump.  Well, time will tell.  For their sake I hope Trump wins and actually has the smarts to fix the economy.  I don’t assume it’s guaranteed that he can fix it.  Our economy and the government’s finances have been tricked up by the geniuses in Washington for a couple of decades now.  Things may be so fouled up that fixing will take a decade to accomplish.  Well, Donald, good luck.

The Final Summer Spree

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Yesterday we had the end of summer family party.  The weather has been remarkably nice with temperatures in the eighties, beautiful blue skies and kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews filling the swimming pool and old folks smiling at memories of summers long past.

There was some politics thrown in here and there.  After all, it’s in our blood.  I joked about my impending campaign and how I’ll need at least ten million dollars to assure my victory.  But no checks were forthcoming.  But most of the day and evening was taken up with grilling meat, containing grease fires, eating fattening foods and sitting around talking about the best parts of the recent vacations, kids going off to college and whose arthritic joints hurt worse.

One of my sisters-in-law was marveling at all the various butterflies that were flitting around the aptly named butterfly bush that Camera Girl employs me to keep well-watered.  And it was interesting that they had selected the party day to come out in full force to get the last nectar from this plant resource.  It was one last reminder that nature rejoices in the summer almost as much as I do.

By the time the last guest had left and I had assisted Camera Girl in wrapping up the leftovers it was 11pm and it was time to walk the dogs and lock the doors.

Today we had the kids and grandkids back over to finish up the food and go swimming again in the pool.  I grilled up the last of the burgers and we stuffed the kids with pie, lemonade, ice cream and cake.  Remarkably, they never seem to get too full or groggy from all that sugar.  They just head back to the pool or play some badminton or soccer.

I was talking to their parents about school.  They start school a week from tomorrow and the grandkids were not happy at all by this talk about it.  I could see their faces fall at the mention.  So, I quickly added that the pool won’t be closing up until the day after they go back to school and they could come over every day they were allowed to if they liked.

But it struck me that I remember feeling exactly the same way when school was looming over us like that.  It was an awful feeling and at that moment I remembered what nine-year-old me felt like.  Ah, the persistence of memory.

We haven’t had any real rain in over a month and the state is declaring a drought.  My water comes from a well and since I live next to a swamp, I figure there’s probably a trillion gallons of water still in there.  Maybe a trillion and a half.  That’s what we call an engineering estimate.

But the fields are as dry as a bone.  I’ve been watering the vegetable garden and the flower gardens pretty religiously but a lot of the flowers have given up the ghost.  But that’s what late August is; the beginning of the dying time.  I guess I should be unhappy about the drought and the straw-like grass.  But I’m not.  I always hope that summer will stretch into September.  Sure, an inch or two of rain would be fine.  But eighty-degree days and blue skies are as close to heaven as I can imagine.  And soon enough the days will shorten and cool.  It’s inevitable.  So, another week or two of summer looks good to me.

I notice the Democrats are laying it on pretty thick about how the arc of history is bending toward their mid-term success.  Blah, blah, blah.  And the predictable Republicans are panicking about all this.  “Oh no!  The Trump selected candidates will go down in flames.  Quick, make friends with the progressives!”  Feckless losers.  People are telling me we must move to the middle.  And I tell them there is no middle.  There’s getting what you want and there’s folding like a cheap suit.  Pick one.

But the result will be upon us soon and I can deal with either eventuality.  A true binary is upon us.  We either win or lose.  And I can deal with either result.  But no more uncertainty.  Either the American people throw off the Democrats or they don’t.

What a beautiful sunset tonight.  It’s a joy to see a day this beautiful.

The Last Day of July 2022

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“August up ahead. Sure. But the way things are going, there’ll be no machines, no friends, and darn few dandelions for the last harvest.” – Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

Today is the last day of July.  So, tomorrow is the first official day of winter in Dunwich.  I know that seems odd but it’s true.  July is the only truly bulletproof month of the year.  By the end of August weird freaky cold spells can happen and June is certainly no proof against frost.  Also, it’s only in July that heat can blast all the cold out of old bones and a soul and convince you that there is still some kernel of boy left in an old man.

Of course, I’m ignoring the multitude of annoying problems of summer.  Mosquitoes, poison ivy, wearing hats and sunscreen, stifling houses, watering plants, cutting grass, etc. etc. etc.  But all of that pales into insignificance when you sit on a porch and listen to the crickets chirp and watch the fireflies flash.

And if you’re gathering with friends and family, it’s especially nice.  The long, long days of July have enough time for all the fun (and the chores) that go along with summer.  By definition the Fourth of July cookout is the cornerstone of the month but there is room for a bunch of barbecues and parties.  This year we lured the grandkids over a bunch of times to swim in the pool.  And that of course means taking care of the pool which is a royal pain but the reward ratio is still plenty high to make up for it.

Well today is the end.  August is a summing up.  It’s rushing in whatever is left to do and making sure to start getting ready for what comes next.  For the kids that’s school and fall.  For adults it’s beginning to put away all the summer stuff and prepare the winter equipment.  So, I’m going to enjoy today for sure.

Yesterday was a family get together.  A younger nephew had a birthday party and my kids and grandkids showed up with other of my siblings and their kids.  Over pizza for the kids and some very good Italian appetizers we talked about this and that.

I had an interesting discussion about a report I read about how faked biomedical research on Alzheimer’s disease has set back the course of finding a cure at least fifteen years.  The feedback was that fake research and shoddy peer review is now endemic and that science is thoroughly infected with quackery.  This jibes with the growing pseudoscience of climate change and all the nonsense that gets reported as research in the social sciences and psychology.

And maybe we’re kidding ourselves and it’s always been like this.  But it does seem to me that the public has reached a point where gullibility is dangerously high.  The COVID madness proved that supposed adults will do anything they’re told if it’s wrapped in a government program.

But for me it’s just one more reminder that we’re not “all in this together.”  Critical thinking and maintaining options may save your life and definitely will save you a lot of grief and money.  The Left has clearly shown us what they intend to do.  They’re looking to make us serfs.  It behooves us to work with whatever resources and allies we have to make that as hard as possible.

Well, anyway, enjoy July Thirty First.

 

 

And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.

He knew it first when walking downtown.  Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dime-store window.  They stood there unable to move because of the things from another world displayed so neatly, so innocently, so frighteningly, there.

“Pencils, Doug, ten thousand pencils!”

“Oh, my gosh! ” – Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

Summer All in a Day

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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?

A Hint of Summer

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As I mentioned earlier Camera Girl and I went out this morning on a photographic journey to capture the flowers and other manifestations of spring.  There’s a very large elm tree, the only healthy mature elm in the whole area of the state, that was just about to bud.  And I wanted to get a shot of the skunk cabbage that are impressively large this year.  So, we went here and there and that took up the early morning.  Then we did some more prosaic things.  I needed to buy about four hundred feet of hose for the gardens.  And Camera Girl needed some cherry tomato plants for her garden.  Then we came home and I had to do some repairs to a fence.

And about halfway through my work I realized it was way too warm to wear a sweatshirt.  So, I looked up in the sky and around the yard and thought, “Summer’s coming.”

And that’s funny because last night the weather girl said there was a frost warning for the area.  New England is a strange place.  I read that there has been measurable snow in Massachusetts in every month but July.  It’s a mighty silly way to run a climate.  That much is certain.

But we’re definitely now in the warm weather and people will start trying to enjoy life.  They’ll want to have cookouts and go to sports events and head for the lakes and beaches.  And even though they’ll have their little pleasures, each time they’ll notice that things cost too much and they can’t afford to do what they did a few years ago.  And it will rankle them.

As I said recently, Joe Biden’s regime is a tawdry and third-rate effort.  Everyone in it is incompetent, nasty and pathetic.  Between now and November this is going to be reinforced by every increase in gas and food price and every crime spree and incident at the Mexican border.  By November it’ll feel like that constant dull ache you have when you have a bad tooth that needs to be pulled.

But how do you extract Joe Biden?  He’s going to be there for the next few years and we’re stuck with him.  My plan is to strike a balance.  I won’t ignore Biden because he deserves to be mocked and ridiculed for his incompetence and malfeasance.  But at the same time, we need to spend the majority of our time planning and performing the positive things that make up living.  For me that’s spending time with family and friends, working, playing and of course, annoying Camera Girl.  And those things will keep me more than busy.  But importantly, even the part where I’m blogging won’t be completely taken up reviling Biden.  He’s just not worth it.  From time to time I will wax poetic describing his many failings.  But even then, it will be to make the point that Biden is more of a symptom of our larger problems than a cause.  Any great country that allows itself to be led by anyone as stupid and dishonest as Joe Biden has already reached a crisis and must do much more than replace him to correct the dire straits it’s already in.

This week Camera Girl and I will be getting together with friends we haven’t seen in way too long because of the COVID nonsense.  We’ll go to soccer games and tennis matches that the grandsons are playing in.  We’ll work in the yard and do our spring chores.  And we’ll be hosting the first barbecues of the season.  It’s still mid-spring but it feels like summer is opening up in front of us.

So, the winter of Biden discontent is turning glorious summer and we’ll work around him.  He’s a hindrance to enjoying life but he isn’t terminal.  What we need to spend time doing is thinking of how we escape from the Leftist death trap we’re in.  Elon Musk gave us a taste of what it means to win a victory against the Left.  Other leaders need to do their parts.  DeSantis is doing his part.  It’s time for other governors and legislatures to emulate these tactics and push back against the Left.

Summer’s coming.  I’m going to get out there and live.

31JUL2021 – OCF Update – Last Day of July

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Tomorrow is the official first day of winter here in New England.  I’ll start up the snow blower and dig out my shovel, close up the storm windows and turn on the heating system.  I’ll put away the shorts and shortsleeve shirts and dig out the thermal underwear and mukluks.  It was a good summer although there was a lot of rain.  But now we have to get down to the serious part of life, surviving the horrors of winter.  We’ll be cheered by some of the winter holidays like Labor Day and Halloween but we’ll be ever conscious of the threat we face from frostbite and cannibalism.  Camera Girl made some veiled hints about there not being enough meat on my bones.  I sleep with one eye open and my right hand trailing onto the floor where the axe handle is there if needed.  Trust but verify.

Actually it’s been very pleasant the last couple of days.  Low eighties, high seventies and sunny except it rains at night, which is fine by me.  I’ve never seen the grass this green at the end of July.  All in all, pretty remarkable.  Camera Girl had a special plant of hers come up and bloom for the first time this year.  She says it’s called a moon flower.  It’s shaped like a giant white trumpet.  Something like an enormous morning glory flower.  Interestingly it blooms at night.  I’ll put up some photos of it soon under a separate post.  She was very excited about it and it was nice to see her so happy about it.

In related news some of the Elecampane seeds I planted may finally be sprouting.  Not sure yet because the sprouts are too small to tell.  I have more seeds and may put some more in dirt just in case but it’s encouraging to see something starting.

All kidding aside, today is the last day of July and that is a milestone around here.  The kids start getting anxious about school and with this nonsense about masking again I can’t blame them.  Maybe people will come to their senses and spare their own flesh and blood this nonsense.

Well, lots going on, more to come here.  Stay tuned.