Someone here in Dunwich flipped the Winter\/Summer switch and now instead of shivering under a mountain of blankets at night I\u2019m throwing off the sheet and turning on the ceiling fan.\u00a0 Well, that\u2019s as it should be.\u00a0 Summer is brief and anything in the eighties is okay by me.<\/p>\n
Camera Girl and I have been planting vegetables and a few flowers.\u00a0 But today I finally ordered some thornless red raspberry plants for her.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Somehow, she thinks people shouldn\u2019t charge money for plants.\u00a0 When this hesitancy goes on for too long, I step in and buy whichever choice I think she\u2019d like to have the most.\u00a0 Otherwise, she\u2019d end up missing the season and be unhappy which would go against my internal value measuring mechanism.<\/p>\n
Currently I\u2019m studying the vagaries of lag bolt, pilot hole diameter as it relates to the designation of hard vs. soft wood.\u00a0 I have been collecting the hardware I need for the latest battle in the war on decay.\u00a0 Current my side is losing.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Or at least several fence posts.<\/p>\n
I consider this foray a proof of concept.\u00a0 If successful, this will pave the way for a permanent solution to my fence problems.\u00a0 If it fails, I must contemplate drastic measures involving steel posts and concrete which would be expensive and extremely time consuming.\u00a0 But, ever the optimist, I refuse to even consider the possibility of defeat.<\/p>\n
Camera Girl has been spotting critters around the yard.\u00a0 She and the hounds have cornered some frogs and toads.\u00a0 And yesterday she spotted a snake in her garden.\u00a0 Her description was puzzling.\u00a0 It was about a foot long and relatively thin but she said it was solid yellow.<\/p>\n
We had a complete lack of garter snakes in the yard last year which was highly unusual.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Anyway, Camera Girl\u2019s description sounded like an extremely unusual color and pattern for a garter.\u00a0 I speculated that it was some kind of aberrantly light phase of the brown snake of which we have a generous number here.\u00a0 I claimed skepticism of her description but she reminded me that I\u2019m color blind so I deferred to her chromatic superiority.\u00a0 I will search out this strange creature at some point.<\/p>\n
So, I\u2019m mostly enjoying the Summer of Dopey Joe.\u00a0 Despite suffering through the annoyance of dealing with unreliable appliances from China and shortages of spare parts due to the \u201csupply chain breakdown\u201d I am still mostly cheerful.\u00a0 Of course, if rolling blackouts become the outrage of the month in August that would tick me off.\u00a0 But it would also give us a shot at winning some of the New England states in November.\u00a0 And that would be an especially sweet cherry on top of the schadenfreude parfait.\u00a0 There are hints of congressional and senate seats that might flip.\u00a0 These would be transitory gains.\u00a0 New England is permanently blue.\u00a0 The people live at the center of the Cathedral.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s something I always want to celebrate.\u00a0 Now where is that sunscreen?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Someone here in Dunwich flipped the Winter\/Summer switch and now instead of shivering under a mountain of blankets at night I\u2019m throwing off the sheet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3366,1263],"tags":[3341,342],"class_list":["post-18914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-life-in-dunwich","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-dunwich","tag-new-england-summer"],"yoast_head":"\n