Too #&$*%*#@% HOT!

I am sorry that the weather decided to make up for the cool and damp of early summer and give Maine (and indeed, it seems, much of the east and north eastern US) the entire summers worth of heat in a week. If you have read my blogs for long, you know my opinion is that 80 degrees is as hot as it needs to get. And that by that, I do NOT mean "mid-80s" or gawd forbid the "high 80s" to 90+ degree temps that are forecast for today. [metric translation: My opinion is that 27 degrees is as hot as it needs to get. And that by that, I do NOT mean "low-30s" or gawd forbid the "mid-30" degree temps that are forecast for today.]

It is too hot to move, too hot to breathe but yet the garden still needs weeding and especially needs water, so I have been trying to weed early in the morning, in the very heavy dew and have been applying soaker hose to plants on a rotating basis. But that still leaves putting food by (even the bit of heat to blanch a few veggies is noticeable in he kitchen) and housework which as multiplied with the pup.

And speaking of pup, Coffee appears to be a very smart doggie. She is learning quickly about the pee and poop outside thing, and has not messed in the bedroom since about the second night we had her... and she HAS got me up in the wee hours to go out. She seems to know what is expected, just with a bit of confusion and possible lack of maturity (inability to hold urine sufficiently long to get leashed up and taken out on occasion). Her "accidents" are pretty much directly in front of a door (not always the door to outside, though that is becoming increasingly the only place accidents happen.) and since said doors are covered with linoleum or an old mud mat that came with the house, the scolding of "bad dog" only carried the energy needed for training and no extra "oomph" from the stress of a potentially ruined floor.

Hex orders have dropped again, but this is not necessarily a bad thing, as I need the time (once the weather cools enough, especially) to clean and organize the workspace. I do have one job pending -- the painting of a hex on a rock for a friend to place overlooking his garden. And of course I need to update the website.

Other than that, life continues. We have finally got a lumber list and a friend will be ordering it for us from a local fellow with a sawmill, so we can build a small deck and decent set of steps for the back door to the dog yard. This has been an issue since we moved in -- the bottom two "steps" are nearly 18" tall, which makes it difficult for me and the big dog and impossible for the small one. The delay on this is partly a money issue and partly a motivation of Kevin issue.

He spends increasingly more time "lost" or "gone" into his own mind or who knows where.... asleep in part and just not here in part as well. Some of this is from pain, I am sure, some from the fact that even with the CPAP machine, he is not sleeping even close to a "normal" night. However his primary care practitioner finally made a referral to a neurologist for a look at several issues and we had the appointment last week. After an initial terrible meeting, due totally to screw-ups on the part of their staff, we got seen during a cancellation in the early afternoon of the same day as the messed up appointment. It was not fun cooling our heels in Bangor for several hours, with few necessary errands and a Kevin who was hurting, but we did it.

The doc only got started on ONE of the three issues, but even to my untrained eye, the exam found abnormalities for him to work with/on. This is in remarkable contrast to most exams of any sort, in which he comes out "textbook perfect" even though something is obviously the matter. Doc ordered an MRI (two CAT scans have failed to find anything) and a 24 hour EEG (typical EEG was one of those "textboox perfect" tests...) MRI is today at 6 PM and he gets wired up for the EEG next Tues. This is a set up where he wears a unit for 24 hours, and we push a button on the machine, and log in a journal, any "events" that might produce signals they would need to look at in detail.

The neurologist office scheduled BOTH of these appointments while we waited, as well as our next visit to that office -- one of the most efficient medical practices I have seen thus far. I have high hopes that he will uncover something; whether it will be something treatable, I am not sure. K's counselor seems to think that his exposure to ball lightning as a young child may account for some of the abnormalities in his brain.

In the yard, our humming birds and gold finches continue to visit the feeders and I still hear an occasional killdeer and see the swallows swooping on skeeter patrol.

We have been visited by a (couple of?) young skunks. One we both saw ambling across the grass and one was almost surprised by K and Coffee last night on their walk around the house. The young Pepe Le Pew was eating up spilled seed under the backyard bird feeder.

Thus far the two-strand monofiliment deer fence seems to be working and (crossing fingers) the turkeys have yet to find the garden. I have a "bunch" of about a half dozen grapes on one of the two grape vines, and have eaten a few blueberries, but I need to deer fence the berry area and the canes of the branbleberries have been being munched on by deer. I'll look today in the big boxes for the cheap plastic step-in posts, hoping they have resupplied since my last visit.

As I have been trying to get out and weed, I continue to find food in the garden; excavating the visible Brussels sprout plants, I noted the second planting of carrots still trying to grow under the weeds and have begun to give them light and room too... I'll put the soaker on the row later today so I can do a good weeing job on them tomorrow, with luck.

Peppers are not producing well -- no big surprise as they seem picky to me and have not had the care they deserve, but the tomatoes are beginning to come on, as are the cukes. Gotta get "stuff" for pickling today -- cukes and beets for sure.

Whew, that's a lot of words. Now I am typed out...