Summer Spoilers

These are the stickers I combed out of Spike’s tail and undercarriage after a brief walk down to the creek and back before it got too hot. He likes to chase his Kong and then lie down in the grass. This was newly mowed so we thought it would be ok but he managed to attract a lot of these burrs in the process. It’s a shame, because these summer spoilers put a lot of places off limits until it rains again….

Tim came up this morning to take Owen and his friend to the inflatable water park at Spring Lake. We are expecting them back here soon and are planning a traditional 4th of July barbecue of burgers, corn on the cob potato salad and green salad. Dana will be joining us as well. Jim and Peter are in Indiana visiting Jim’s mother.

We are a little limp this afternoon as the temperature climbs once again. I don’t think it is quite as hot as it was yesterday but the house didn’t cool off as much last night either. The whole neighborhood is eerily quiet save for the raucous crows that have staked out various branches of the oak trees and are trying to hold their parliamentary meetings at some distance from each other.

Earlier there was one squirrel on each bird feeder, both upside down as the seeds were down to the bottom hole. The jays make half hearted attempts to drive them off, dive bombing them from above, but even those attempts seem a bit desultory.

It feels like the summer doldrums of late August and September and it is barely July.
My attempt to record the Tour de France were unsuccessful but we’ll have some experts here later to figure out where I went wrong.

It feels like the summer doldrums of late August and September and it is barely July.
Bizarrely, the ski slopes are still open and expected to remain open until we’ll into August after the winter storms dropped an unprecedented 900 inches of snow in the Sierra.