First rainy day all month

Hapi and beach friends

It has been a week of dealing with garden harvesting and heat. The tomatoes have really enjoyed this weather, I have a bumper crop as do many others in this area. Green beans keep coming, and no matter what you do to avoid this there is always way too much zucchini. My freezer is almost full and I am looking at ways to cram yet more food in. I should have canned the tomatoes but freezing them is so much easier and I just did not anticipate the quantity. I've been eating a lot of tabbouleh and tomato salads…

Hapi and I visited her best friend Ava the other day, Ava was not feeling well. Her owner said the vet had discovered "a mass" in her belly that could be very serious. At the moment she is on antibiotics, steroids and water pills, so hard to say whether she is not feeling well because of the mass or the medication. I thought Ava would long outlive Hapi, but maybe not.

A local guy died last week of a massive heart attack, he was a bit of an icon around here. A little bit older than me, he ran a shop on Main Street that was infamous in its heyday, he dealt in psychedelic paraphenalia. The place was a little warren of stuff: smoking gear, incense, posters, record albums, etc etc. The little bit of light that came through the big front window hardly made it more than a few feet into the interior. He also dealt in used furniture and his main customers were students looking to buy for the school year and sell at the end of it. Most of us parents had kids who hung around that shop. He also kept doberman pinscher dogs, he loved that breed. He sat out front of his shop in an old wooden swivel office chair with one of his dogs lying at his feet whenever the weather was good; he was a street fixture. In later years he had health issues that made him grumpy, he sold the business to a young guy who radically revamped it and we hardly saw him on the street anymore. After his last doberman died suddenly he did not get another one. But news of his death travelled fast, in spite of his disappearance from street life he was definitely not forgotten. 

I visited B on the weekend. The nursing home schedules the visits now, you just have to show up. B was in an ornery mood, she'd been chastised by a worker at the home and she was annoyed about it. Group living is hard. But otherwise she's okay. She says she'd rather be living in her old apartment where she has a little more freedom, but she can't really take care of herself and she'd be trapped there as much as she feels trapped in the nursing home. In the home they don't allow people to play cards because of the pandemic, but at her old apartment she'd have nobody to play with anyway.

Beach decorations

The heat wave seems to have broken, maybe temporarily or permanently, hard to tell. At any rate yesterday was quite lovely and today it is raining. It's not really a lot of rain but it is definitely welcome. Hapi perked up quite a bit with the cooler weather, instead of going straight to the pond to soak yesterday we went instead for an explore on the bike trails in the woods. She hasn't wanted to do that in many weeks. Watching her prance down the street later in the evening I felt like she was back to her old self.

In honour of the cooler wet weather I am doing a bit of cooking today, bread and bone broth. And of course tabbouleh with lots of tomatoes. Last night I sat outdoors chatting with neighbours, one of them had bought corn earlier in the day. We debated who grew the best corn, two of us plumped for one farm, one for another. We'll have to do a taste test.

And finally, my car's exhaust system is broken yet again. Each time it is a different part, and each time the part is so expensive that my mechanic has tried to replace it with something less expensive. I hope he succeeds one more time.