Miscellaneous photo dump

The fireweed is very beautiful!

Cricket is comfy. Also, it finally got hot enough that she came inside of her own will yesterday (85 degrees F). Let us hope we do not experience any more of those temperatures!

Thistle is comfy. She is Not Interested in laying out in the sun.

I splurged and got this fancy-ass Yumi Watermelon. It cost a dollar a pound! But look how beautiful it is! And it was so crisp, so sweet, so perfect!

Awww Cricket was being cute!

Sometimes in the evenings, Miss Thistle wants to hang out in the yard nowadays. But still not in the daytime heat!

My little fruit bat would like to know, "Iz there any more froot?"

Summer days

This is why I plant only my tiny Lazy Person's Garden™. My CSA share provides most of our veggies, and God provides most of our beauty.

I still remember my first fireweed. I photographed it along the Alcan as I was moving up to Alaska. 15 years later, I am still amazed at how prolific they are. They look far too luxurious to be that profligately sprinkled. If you were only to see one, you'd definitely guess that it was a rare, exotic thing.

Mung beans for hot weather! I found them amung the dry goods at the Asian grocery store.

Also jiu-cai. Mmmm... What shall I make with them?

And look what has appeared in the yard! Raspberries!

Wowee!

Oh my goodness!

The summer intern that I'm supervising is an electrical engineering student who hasn't yet taken the last semester of physics, so I--with Cricket's supervision--got to be the person to tell him that the speed of light is invariant with respect to frame of reference! At one point he asked, "Wait light is a wave that can go through a vacuum... so what is waving?" and we got to discuss the Michelson–Morley experiment as well. (If he had been born 120 years ago, he might've been one of the great physicists of the era, but alas, Bohr and Einstein and them already beat him to it.) We also got to talk about gravitational lensing and Snell's Law and a bunch of other stuff.

It reminded me of a newspaper column I read pre-pandemic in which the author described taking his 13-year-old niece to see Romeo and Juliet performed in a theater. The girl was in suspense the whole time, and cried at the end! I sometimes wish I could experience Romeo and Juliet for the first time, just like I think it would be really awesome to learn about special relativity for the first time.

Is this why other middle-aged people take up extreme sports? Because there are fewer and fewer things we can experience for the first time? I'm very risk-averse and not interested in extreme sports, but arts and literature are always being created, so I will always have that.

Dog Diversity

Contemplative dog:

Squeezy dog:

Notes from Here and There

It's been hot. Very hot. Miserably hot.

Cricket still wanted to lay in the sun until temperatures topped 90F, then she moved to the shade.

However, when it got to 95F, I called her inside. It was making me too hot to look at her out there.

She didn't object too much.

I did think of one way to deal with cooking in the heat--make our starch in the morning! I cannot abide boiling pots of pasta, nor a rice cooker, these evenings. Potato salad!

Pasta salad!

My first time doing this particular part of my Giant Rubber Band Leg Recovery exercises without a Mysterious and Disturbing Popping occurring deep in my ankle. The doctor said it would go away in time, and he was correct!

My Lazy Person's Garden™ is still looking very pretty:

Maybe even more so from this angle!

This is my favorite color columbine, and it's well-established now!

The first fireweed have begun to arrive!

Look at this crazy delphinium! I wonder what happened to it.

Cilantro and basil:

Future tomatoes:

Sage and thyme:

These wee tiny alpine phlox show up in the front yard every year and make my heart smile.

Even in the summer heat, Cricket is the Best Snuggler!