7 Quick Takes (Vol 180)

Oh my gosh tomorrow is September 1!!!! Stop the world I want to get off and stay in Summer. And I haven’t done my September banner yet. Gads!

Remember after you have preserved for future use the blather you harvest here, click on the picture above to be whisked, at the speed of my quickly filling freezer, over to Conversion Diary to see what everyone else is doing.

Get this blather done!

1.
Hurricane Issac please stay away until Monday. No rain on Sunday please.

I am photographing this lovely bride’s wedding and we need beautiful, late afternoon sun.

Thank you.

2.
I am sorry to say that HHBL’s baseball season is done for the year….at least until November that is.

Despite a valiant effort, they were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.

But the Roy Hobbes World Series of Baseball is really just around the corner. An entire week of baseball in the lovely Florida weather.

I think I can wait that long. Barely.

3.
This morning one of my walking buddies handed me a nice bag of Swiss Chard.

Now to figure out what to do with it. I haven’t ever used Swiss Chard before. Thoughts anyone?

4.
The Late Summer Ennui is full upon me. It happens every year. I fight it. Sometimes I win….sometimes I lose. I just don’t have the time to be sunk into the warm lassitude of not wanting to do anything but sit and read.

There are still more tomatoes to be processed.

But I won’t be freezing any raspberries this year. I waited just a bit too long to go out to my raspberry picking place. Between last week and this their plants developed some sort of bug. They had to stop the picking and “remove the planting”. That last bit sounds rather drastic to me.

So we will be without fresh raspberries in the freezer this year. Rats.

5.
The bees and I continue to battle. Because it is late Summer-Early Fall they are very active, and agitated. HHBL and I won’t be able to stack our wood until the nest has been taken care of. I walked over there yesterday and there was a LARGE number of bees circling the nest area.

They have also become an issue as we sit on the deck in the evening for dinner. And when you walk up the front walk as you have to walk past the hummingbird feeder which can be covered with bees in the afternoon with more zooming around and hovering. They are also preventing the hummers from actually feeding.

This morning I was out before the sun rose to spray the area and after my walk I was back out there to pour a large amount of boiling water down the hole.

It is the bees or me……..and it isn’t going to be me.

6.
The Republican National Convention is over. That means that I can actually go to bed at a reasonable time again. Staying up until 11:30p for three nights in a row and still getting up at 5:30a is not great. And watching after 8p does violate my “no politics after 8p” rule but I suspend that for the RNC Convention.

And no I won’t be watching the Democratic Nation Convention. I want to be able to sleep.

And on a side note. The ONLY way to watch either convention is on CSPAN (if you have cable). It is straight convention coverage, no annoying talking heads. You see every speech, even the less than stellar ones. Unfiltered. No commercials.

Perfect.

7.
We live in/around the woods, as I might have mentioned a bazillion times. Over the past few years I haven’t done anything to retard the growth of the wild grape vines that cover the bushes that reside next to our driveway and between our house and the house next door.

There was a very specific reason for that. The house next door was here long before ours. There is a fairly nice wooded patch between the houses BUT before we built the house Rich and Sandy had a lovely view of just woods and wild life. Their deck and their lovely family room look right out onto our garage doors. Not lovely. So I have just allowed that area to remain as wild as possible so they don’t have to look out on our boring garage.

This year……..

The vines have produced a bunch of wild grapes.

They are very small and intensely blue.

They aren’t sweet (an understatement) and they are very “seedy” but they have an intense grape flavor.

So I harvested them. Now I just have to figure out what to do with them. There might be enough to make a small batch of jelly of some kind.

I will let you know what happens.