July 5, 1999

Books, Weeds and Meat

Today was mostly lazing about Holiday day.

I slept in late after missing so much sleep the last few days. John took advantage of the morning and did the shades in the upstairs bedrooms and announced them good. They cut out a lot of the light coming in from the skylights so that the rooms weren't nearly as hot as quickly.

It was still hot, but not quite as bad as the last two days. The a.c. wasn't on continuously, and it was actually possible to go out. Most of my oregano is dead, but there's a few hearty plants that are still green. Most of it is black, though. That's sad. The parsley is all lacy and ragged and most of the leaves are gone, the branches are still solid and green so there's a little hope. Something likes the basil and is eating holes out of the opal basil leaves, which is mildly sad, but it seems to be doing okay, otherwise. One of the spicy bush basils is doing just nuts, the other has stopped growing, and I'm not at all sure why. Something's been doing damage to its leaves as well; but I'm reluctant to put insecticides on herbs, since I'm going to be eating them mostly straight off the plant.

I watered the whole box really thoroughly, and the shade seems to be helping, as the oregano that's left seems a lot healthier now that it's got some shade.

Breakfast was the cereal they handed out in boxes from outside the Rockies game. It was yummy. John worked on learning HTML from his book while I read for most of the morning. Lunch was leftover spaghetti and meatballs.

The ending to Children of the Night really made me think that the author had said, "Okay... there's this completely impossible situation, how do we get the protagonist through this?" and then just went the convoluted path of making it possible without really worrying about plausible. Pulling along the suspension of disbelief until it snapped, for me. By the end I nearly didn't care how they managed to do what they were going to do because it was going to be impossible for them to fail. Part of the problem was killing off nearly everyone they even smiled at before, and they're immune. Gah.

So by the time I was done with that, I was ready to do something else. John said that mowing the 'lawn' would be good, and he went out and started pulling weeds while I took the John Deere out and mowed all the weeds down. The lawn itself has gone dormant in all the heat, so there wasn't really anything much to mow there. The weeds, though, had gotten pretty tall, so it was good to take those down a bit. Lots of dust where the bare patches were, so I was eating grit some of the time and my skin was covered in a fine layer of dust by the time I was done.

It was hot enough that I was sweating pretty solidly by the time I was done. Then I went around with John and picked more wildflowers by pulling them up as weeds. All the bark areas were pretty neat and easy to clean off of the things. The lawn was harder. John had dug out a bunch of them, which was cool. I took a few more. By the end of all that the garbage can was full of weeds.

So I went back inside, into the blessed AC and took a long, cool shower and dressed nicely and we then drove to Eagle to get some stuff, Biggs to get a few more things including sugar for more root beer, and finally went to the Outback for dinner. By the time we go there we were both starving. Evenso I wasn't able to finish more than half my rack of lamb ribs and potato, and John had just enough room for his rack of ribs. So I took the rest home for some other day. The rack of New Zealand lamb was tender, juicy and perfectly spiced. Yum.

We watched TV for a while after we got back, and then went to bed. There were still about half a dozen moths, and the weather said that it was supposed to cool of at night, so, instead of leaving the AC on, I just opened the door and the windows and we got a bit of a breeze going. It still wasn't cool enough for me to sleep very well, though I tried. It was still too hot.

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