Tag: Summer

Mid-Summer Mumblings

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Here we are in the last week of July.  Wow.  The days fly by when you’re too busy with annoying drudgery.  So that’s a strange way of looking at it.  While engaged in the drudgery it’s crawling along.  But when I finally escape, the day is already wasted away.  And what’s left flies down the gravity drain into the past in the blink of an eye.  So, I’m just annoyed at the present situation.  And it’s only gonna get worse in August and so I’m terribly disgruntled.  But until I figure a way out of the trap I’m in, it’s gonna be status quo.  Enough.  Well, at least I have the weekend off so I’m going to enjoy the next two days as much as is humanly possible.  So, stop complaining!

We’re five episodes into the first season of “Landman” and it’s a very odd experience.  The main story of Billy Bob Thornton’s character trying to manage a chaotic mix of oil field accidental mayhem, narcotraficante related mayhem and roughneck related mayhem is interesting but the subplot involving his terminally self-absorbed ex-wife is extremely annoying.  The other themes associated with his son and daughter are pretty good and his son’s story is expanding into a larger role.  Camera Girl and I are enjoying the experience of having a show that we can both watch with at least some degree of interest.  There was one scene that I found particularly funny.  Tommy Norris’s ex-wife is trying to stage a “family” dinner with herself, Tommy, their two kids and the two oil company guys who are staying at the company “house.”  She insists that they all join hands around the table for a prayer and after it’s over the two outsiders are talking about it and one guy says, “Well, that was the first dinner prayer I can remember that was explicitly blasphemous.”

Friday, Saturday and Sunday’s weather is supposed to be beautiful.  The kids came over to use the pool today and they said the temperature was perfect.  And the butterfly bush is finally in full flower and monarchs and swallowtails (tiger and pipevine) are increasingly present as photographic subjects.  And the raspberry canes are starting to produce a bumper crop of berries.  So, this is peak mid-summer experience and if I wasn’t committed to an annoying task I would be in seventh heaven.  Well, I guess it’s not that bad if I can take the time to complain this much about it.

One of our neighbors put out a bit of video from her bird feeder.  It was of a black bear’s nose stuck up against the camera.  The bear’s claws were fairly impressive and a good reminder that even a black bear is not a Disney character that you can approach with impunity.  We have a bunch of blueberry bushes that are just about ripe so we may be getting a visit from Yogi and company at any time.  I have a game camera mounted but I didn’t return the memory stick last time I downloaded the files.  I probably should.

Well, that’s enough for now.  Just regular stuff going on.  Enjoy July.

31AUG2025 – And Then, Quite Suddenly, Summer Was Over

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Bradbury understood summer to a boy.

 

“And then, quite suddenly, summer was over.
He knew it first when walking downtown. Tom grabbed his arm and pointed gasping, at the dimestore 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!”
“Nickel tablets, dime tablets, notebooks, erasers, water colors, rulers, compasses, a hundred thousand of them!”
“Don’t look. Maybe it’s just a mirage.”
“No,” moaned Tom in despair. “School. School straight on ahead! Why, why do dime stores show things like that in windows before summer’s even over! Ruin half the vacation!”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

 

“June dawns, July noons, August evenings over, finished, done, and gone forever with only the sense of it all left here in his head. Now, a whole autumn, a white winter, a cool and greening spring to figure sums and totals of summer past. And if he should forget, the dandelion wine stood in the cellar, numbered huge for each and every day. He would go there often, stare straight into the sun until he could stare no more, then close his eyes and consider the burned spots, the fleeting scars left dancing on his warm eyelids; arranging, rearranging each fire and reflection until the pattern was clear…
So thinking, he slept.
And, sleeping, put an end to Summer, 1928.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

 

The yearly ritual continues.

 

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.