a cheat

It goes without saying that we make no effort to keep any of the grasses alive at the farmette in this period of hot, dry weather. We care little about “lawn” and indeed, eliminate as much of it as we can by extending flowers, vegetables, trees, sometimes quite randomly, into the landscape.

But I do care about our flowers and Ed cares about the trees and so we keep our well pump working as we run the hose (and many extensions of it) from one end of the property to the next.

It’s not likely that we’ll dry out the well. But being inclined to ask *what if* questions, I do ask Ed: what would happen if we depleted our own little water supply?

I should check the water level... he tells me. Yes, please do!
The thing is, I don’t know how high it was before all this started...

And so I shrug off the *what ifs* and we continue to try to keep the young trees alive and the newly planted beds from turning into straw.

For a moment today, it looked like it may rain. As I ride Rosie to work (I know I am not paid to work now, but that’s one big cheat because I have an endless list of work related things to accomplish this summer), I feel a drop on my arm. And then another.

...and that’s it. It pains me to think that much prayer, dancing and wishful thinking may have been done in the hope that it would rain.  But, the clouds came and left, accomplishing nothing (except maybe giving us a respite from the heat for a few afternoon hours).

[It was cool enough to stay on the porch for much of the morning. It's a good time to watch the birds outside. I did not know, before today, that these yellow finches suck on flower petals.]

In other news, various events and eating opportunities surrounding my daughter’s September wedding are coming upon us and I can’t help but think about food that will be consumed then. And, too, about how little attention I give toward food preparation now, when the days are long and hot and Ed and I are terribly distracted by keeping plants alive and by discovering new technologies.

Ah, you didn’t see that one coming, right? Well now, Ed is the biggest time suck for me in all months of the year, but never more than in the summer. So often it is all about fiddling with technologies.

This evening he and I spent hours, really many hours perfecting the art of finding cheap ways to fly to places you want to go to. We haven’t a trip before us. Not in the next few months. But it’s enough that we have one sometime, somewhere. A theoretical possibility sets the search engines in motion and we’re off!

(If I were to lose my job, I think my next best set of skills are those related to finding travel resources – how to get there, what to do, where to stay. Ever since my mom tossed an AAA book into the back seat of the black Chevy Impala back in 1963 and said – here, find us a cheap motel for the night, I became a travel resource junkie.)

And so tonight Ed and I surfed together and did indeed leapfrog over one site to the next, excelling at beating prices until they shriveled to small sums, until I said, firmly, so very firmly – enough! Time for supper!

...which was, again, inconsequential. Leftover broccoli (!), defrosted shrimp and horseradish sauce.

I’ll say this – out on the porch, by the light of the setting sun, in the cool breezes of a Wisconsin summer evening, perhaps you'd call it a cheat, but I felt it to be a quite luxurious meal. (Ed joined me once he replaced yet another part in our terribly aging cars.)