It’s been borderline unbearably hot and humid here, for me, anyway. Anything over 25C and I’m wanting to move further north…though, according to one friend who lives VERY far north, it was just as hot and humid there, so maybe there is no escaping it. Today, however, though it was hot and humid throughout the first part of the day, cooled off considerably and it’s now a lovely chill temperature. Especially since I opened the front door to create a draft and now the house is under 20C for the first time in ages. It’s quite cloudy out and I went and watered outside, which should make it a sure thing for rain.
Actually, rain is on the forecast with these cooler temps for at least the next two days, which I am happy about, but Anders is not, since he is leaving tomorrow for a 2-day motorcycle & museums trip with a friend. They are going to the IKEA museum in Älmhult, and a motor museum and some other ones that sound quite dull if you’re me and cracking good fun if you are a motorcycle geek. 🙂 Karin is moving home tomorrow night after her stint at subletting an apartment in Lund for 2 months.
Our vegetable garden is yielding quite nicely, for two backyard gardeners who had no idea what they were doing. I’ve already been able to harvest several handfuls of baby plum tomatoes, and we’ve had new potatoes at least three times, with lots more still to dig up. I’ve had 3.5 yellow squashes and I pulled another one off tonight, and could see there were at least 3 more plumping up. They get big really fast. Surprisingly fast. I had no idea.
We had planted two yellow squashes and two zucchinis and I pulled off two medium-small zucchinis tonight as well; my first ever homegrown zucchinis. Yum! We love them, and grill them often. I could only see one more coming, but there might be some more babies hidden under the gigantic leaves that umbrella over everything. We planted six kohlrabis as well but only one came up and it’s split down the middle and doesn’t look like it will be edible, so that was a bust. We’ll have to try again next year. There is a full row of carrots that ought to be ready soon and a bunch of new ones that we just planted after starting them on the porch because the second row didn’t take.
And a row of nine baby soybeans that we also restarted on the porch since NONE of the ones we originally planted came up at all. I’m pretty pleased with our efforts all told. I’m glad that we planted things we knew we would actually eat. Next year, I’m going to try artichokes! Ambitious!
Last weekend, I spent some time going through old scrapbooks and notebooks and throwing piles of stuff away: most of it pages carefully cut out of magazines, from all the way back when I was a preteen: advertisements that I thought were clever, fashion spreads, games, riddles, quotes, photographs that I thought were pretty or interesting, poems, illustrations that caught my eye for some reason, short stories, comic strips, postcards and greeting cards. SO. MUCH. PAPER. I emptied FOUR notebooks and filled an entire paper grocery bag with the refuse for recycling. I DID keep one notebook with the things that I still thought were too beautiful or cool or interesting to throw away. I figure I’ll look at them at least a few more times during the downhill side of my life, and since they still bring me pleasure, why not?
There were lots of other things as well, some of which I saved and some of which I tossed: programs from plays and shows I attended, handwritten lists of my favorite things from several different points in my life, stickers, photos, letters. Things given to me by people I care about. Things I saved to remind me of something or somewhere or someone. Not all of them mattered to me anymore, but some of them do. With all the sorting and tossing I am doing, I wonder if I’ll purge my way to a state where I don’t have anything left to go through. HA. As if. I think I need to KEEP ON going through things, sometimes over and over, and continue to whittle down the piles of keepsakes to those that are really essential to me. It’s time, you know?
I saved all the blank postcards and greeting cards, though most of them didn’t have envelopes with them, because I thought, maybe, I should write in them and mail them to people. I could send a card a week or a letter a week for YEARS and barely dent my stationery stash. Who wants a card with a note from me? 🙂