The Flower Tour

I went outside this morning to take pictures of the flowers.  Dad's roses are blooming like crazy.  I sat on the front stoop yesterday for a while and enjoyed the faint fragrance of the roses on the breeze.

The yellow Asiatic lilies are just about done blooming.  There was a tiny little beetle exploring one of the flowers but I don't think you can see it in the picture.






The spiderwort is still blooming in the morning.  The bees love these flowers.



 


And there are little flowers on the potato plants!  They weren't open all the way but I was so excited to see them I had to take their picture to show you.




Not flowers, but fruit is next.  The tomatoes are growing bigger every day.  I can't wait until they start to turn red.

Today's toss was fun.  I pulled out a crate of liqueurs that hadn't been opened in about 10 years, took them to the sink in the basement, and dumped them.  Now my basement smells like a distillery and the recycling guy will think I've had one whale of a party.  There are a couple more crates of booze that will get the same treatment over the next few days.  I'll keep the good stuff, but since I really don't drink, it seems foolish to give this all house room especially since I think some of it was my in-laws and they've been gone for a good 30 years or more.  (Durwood saved everything. Really.)

26 June--Barbara Malcolm, Tropical Obsession. 

That night was the thirty-seventh night in a row with no wind.  During the day there was wind, plenty of wind.  The trade winds blew out of the east as they are supposed to in this latitude, but when the winds dropped at sundown, they did not just drop they died and did not resurrect until the sun rose in the morning.  At first people laughed that the sun was dragging the winds with it as it made its way around the earth, but after a while the joke was not funny anymore.  The night wind was the only thing that made it bearable to sleep indoors.  With no wind the mosquitoes swarmed clogging everyone’s ears and stinging every bit of exposed skin.  People not lucky enough to have air conditioners in their bedrooms suffered because it was just too hot to sleep under covers so the all-over itching from too many mosquito bites woke people up in the middle of the night to curse and scratch.  Sales of repellent skyrocketed and every shop was sold out of the old-fashioned mosquito repellent coils. 

Mona stopped in every store she thought would possibly carry bug spray, Off! or Cutter’s but she had no luck until going into the Sand Dollar mini mart.  The clerk was restocking the shelf with cans of Off! and she bought all six.  That earned Mona a dirty look from the woman who came in asking for repellent as she was checking out.  The clerk told her they were out and motioned to the cluster of cans that Mona was slipping into her shopping bag. 

“I don't suppose you would consider selling me one?” she said with one hand on a hip.   Mona looked at her, at her expensive clothing and ostentatious jewelry, at her Manolo sandals (like her own), and shook her head. 

“Sorry,” she said, “I have a sick baby at home.” 

The woman was so taken aback at having her offer refused she did not even react to the fact that cans of bug spray would do little toward helping a sick child feel better. 

Mona was a bit surprised at herself and her gut reaction to the woman.  She was not in the habit of lying in the first place and she was normally a generous person willing to share. 

“It must be the heat,” she muttered as she slid in the clutch and looked over her shoulder to back out of the parking place.  Before she even moved, she turned off the car and got out.  Next door to the Sand Dollar mini mart was Lover’s Ice Cream.  She needed a cone, a two scooper.  It was hot, and what had happened to the trade winds? And where had Jack gotten to?

I spent a bunch of the day surfing the web looking into the various digital hosting platforms, like Zoom and Google Meet.  The knitting guild is trying to work out how to get people together remotely and I volunteered to do the research into the costs and features of each platform.  It didn't have to be done today but I'm such a good procrastinator that I figured if I didn't dive right in and get it done I'd leave it til the eleventh hour and then do a half-assed job.  So I gathered all the info, typed it up (with bullet points and everything), and emailed it to the board.  Pleased me no end that I remembered how to write up a report like that.
--Barbara