Braving the sun

We extended a walk to our workout joint to include a nearby farmers' market. In full afternoon heat, we wandered around, tasting berries, caramel sauce, goat cheeses and hazelnuts; several unlooked for items found their way into our market backpack. The thin crust pizza from the traveling woodfire oven looked delicious, but it was too hot out to indulge. Hot days make me lose my appetite; I always wonder how people even want to eat in tropical places. Somehow we made it past the handmade ice cream stall and back towards home.

Cruising around in paradise

Yesterday was our sweet kid's 28th birthday, which he celebrated with a bunch of friends at a pub called The Naked City Brewery. Sounds like many tasty brews were had by all; we toasted his birth at our nearby tiki restaurant. Around about the time I was hoisting the Wednesday margarita special last night, early evening, lo those many years ago, I was declared officially "in labor", a nebulous designation with no guaranteed end in sight. A mere three and a half hours later, our dear one arrived on this planet, in the middle of a heat wave. As years go by, I have even fewer reasons to regret reproducing. He's a keeper, like his wonderful dad.
The garden is springing upward, the corn may actually be knee-high to me, at least, by July 4th,
and I got another tomato plant, a cherry tomato, which, if nothing else produces, will give us some little salad garnishes.
Felt like a fish in warm coral seas all day as I walked around doing my errands; 83 degrees in the sun, cooling breezes in the shade. It could not have been more pleasant anywhere.
Am just about finished with John Updike's The Widows of Eastwick, a wonderful revisitation of the fictional Rhode Island town which his witches possessed many years ago. It's a very poignant work on aging, and not limited to the female point of view.

Traditional interruption

Seems like eons since I was here; we have been off to Ashland, Oregon, gorging on excellent theater at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We managed to get one mom to be in good health to go with us, and she was thrilled, at one point beyond words. She got selected randomly by a member of the cast doing a hilarious commedia dell'arte Italian play, "The Servant of Two Masters", to be involved as an innocent bystander, or rather bysitter. That's the risk when you are fortunate enough to get front row seats... My favorite production was a brand-new work, "Equivocation", by Bill Cain. The same cast is bringing it up here to Seattle at the end of its run, and I hope to be able to see it again. The OSF's version of "Don Quixote" received mixed reactions from our group, but I liked it. The production of MacBeth was a killer.
The weather down there was astoundingly gorgeous, even allowing us to sit outside in the evening at dinner, a rare treat for us folks from the great soggy northwest woods. We got in a couple of our favorite hikes, which were full of wildflowers and bluebirds, views of Mount Shasta, and lovely piney odors.
Everybody got to do enough of what they wanted so that all were quite content by the end of the trip.

Solstice

Dramatic skies all day long, but cool for summer; off we go to warmer climes.

A visit

We are expecting our other mother tonight. The day hasn't been a stellar one, owing to a mysterious ailment visited upon one of us which has been worsening, requiring some ER trips; no fair, right as vacation begins. May the miracle of antibiotics commence.

More like it

Cool and rainy, eary this morning, eventually morphing into a lovely late afternoon; strange drowsy behaviors all day long from certain parties, but no one collapsed.
No man's land for reading at the moment; I can't bear to read any more about the Chinese factory girls, nor the economy that has caused them to migrate from rural parts of their country to cities, largely in aid of producing piles of unnecessary and wasteful crap. Maybe all the junk can be sunk to make artificial reefs some day.
Short visit to a friend's birthday celebration and bon voyage for the couple, who are off to walk the Pyranees, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, over 400 miles in about three months. May their feet stay strong.

Thumping

All around the town, getting those much-needed staples; it grew warm and nice, perfect weeding and pruning conditions, then threatening but beautiful clouds settled in around sunset. Rained in the night and early morning, much to the snails' delight.
Somehow I finished the almost 1100 page long Pynchon novel, Against the Day, but I can't really recommend it unless someone is a Pynchon diehard. Parts of it were terrific, and one section in about the middle made me give up in frustration for a while. Bits and pieces of it intrigued me, but there was far too much predictable and cliched tongue in cheek material overall.