Summer Sloth

Just like last year, as soon as it's gotten really hot and humid, lethargy sets in.  I keep thinking about doing a new post, but it's so hard to get anything done when it's 92 degrees out.  I've gone into summer hibernation.  I'll admit I was kind of driven to even write this.  Mirin is gone all weekend at the Firefly Gathering, learning to make weapons he's really not old enough to be in possession of (it was the grandparents' idea).  Rose was a little too young to go, so while Mirin is having the time of his life, Rose and I are completely sick of each other's company.  I am so thankful I have two children in normal circumstances.  I can now understand/sympathize with the single-child families who send their children to childcare programs as soon as they are walking and talking, even if they don't need childcare.  It really is hard to talk to/entertain someone every waking minute of their lives.  A few minutes on the computer is as much of a break as I could hope for.





Of course things have been happening, completely unrecorded, however.  The baby goats are getting big and fat.  They look about twice as tall as they were when they were born.  May's baby is the fattest.  They run around while I do the milking and jump on top of the old decrepit wagon.  Ethan says they look like they have Pogo sticks attached to their feet.  To me, they look like a cyclone of legs and ears.  

The wagon is the same one I used to lug three buckets of feed and water up to the chickens and goats, back when Rose was a baby strapped to my back and I had to move the 400-lb hell-on-little-wheels coop over the grass and cactus all by myself each day.  I had to remove the wheels before it was moved, or the chickens would get out and be eaten over night, and I carried a crow bar around to hoist the edges up until I was strong enough to lift it with my hands.  If it didn't have wheels on it, it couldn't be moved without a large combustion engine.  Somewhere, there's a crow bar out in the pastures still.  Ethan rarely went out, so it was mostly me and the two little kids sweating among the blackberry thorns and the cactus, pulling the wagon with flat tires (Ethan mistakenly bought the one with inflatable tires).  I'm glad the wagon has a new use now.

 We've been getting the nicest melons lately.  Mirin is the official melon-picker, because he's much better than I am at telling if they are ripe or not.  We even got a Delice de la Table melon this year, although I think my favorites were the Eden's Gem, Charantais and Sakata's Sweet.  We didn't get much out of the Golden Jenny melons, which have been so reliable in past years, but I think that had more to do with a bad location than the melons.

We also got a ton of tomatillos this year, and a few lemon squash.  I did something wrong with the summer squash, and it was all I could do to keep them from curling up and dying before we got a few squash out of them.  I think squash skips years.  We've only had a really good summer squash year every other year.  They have different plagues that come through and kill them.  One year it was powdery mildew, after two weeks of solid rain.  Then we had a good year.  Then it was stem borers and Ethan's incompetence.  I was in California that spring, and he planted them in a place where even the bahia grass struggles to survive.  Last year was a good squash year, and low and behold, this year the dreaded squash bug has reared it's ugly head and dispatched our dreams of buttery squash, squash cooked in milk and baked zucchini.  But at least we've gotten a bunch of sweet and hot peppers, for the first time, so it kind of makes up for it.