More Summer Fun

In the summertime, when the weather is hot, you can stretch right up and touch the sky.
— Mungo Jerry

In the summer, the days were long, stretching into each other. Out of school, everything was on pause and yet happening at the same time, this collection of weeks when anything was possible.
— Sarah Dessen

Summer, after all, is a time when wonderful things can happen to quiet people. For those few months, you’re not required to be who everyone thinks you are, and that cut-grass smell in the air and the chance to dive into the deep end of a pool give you a courage you don’t have the rest of the year. You can be grateful and easy, with no eyes on you, and no past. Summer just opens the door and lets you out.
— Deb Caletti

We got off to a bit of a slow start last week, but it started to pick up as it progressed. Monday was a kind of lazy, let’s binge Netflix kind of day. And for lunch it as a Gramie’s charcuterie board kind of day.

Tuesday I spent the better part of the day with my stitchery group at a pot luck garden party. But apparently the husband and the granddaughter have plenty of fun without me. They made themselves egg salad sandwiches for lunch, and went I got home they were having a whale of a time in the pool.

As promised, we did give the papier mâché a try. The shredded paper had been soaking for a couple of days, as the instructions I’d found online said to do. We drained the bowl and squeezed as much excess water out as we could, and mixed the pulp with some glue.

Actually, that was the really fun part. Squishing the sticky mess between our fingers. However, it was also kind of clumpy, and didn’t stick very well. In other words, it was a bust.

But never fear, Gramie had a contingency plan. I’d bought a couple of craft kits earlier in the week, one of which was something called Air Modeling Clay. To be honest, it was more like Modeling Foam, but it was still a lot of fun. So much fun she even persuaded Grappy to join in.

The granddaughter modeled a lot of food, but her favorite was her hamburger, complete with cheese on top of the patty and lettuce underneath. And I believe that’s an olive stuck to the top of it:

The foam like clay was actually a little difficult to work with. It was kind of stretchy, and really didn’t like to hold its shape. But it was workable if you were persistent. The hubby chose to make a monster:

I made a cat and a, um, worm-like creature, but my favorite was my dragon:

At one point the granddaughter got a little fed up with me spending more time taking pictures than crafting. The look says it all:

And when we were finished she had an art show:

Her section is the middle, and is comprised of a taco, her hamburger, I think that’s a tiny slice of pizza in front of the burger, on the plate is a donut (with sprinkles), behind which is a banana split. She also did a really cute representation of her cat, Muffy.

Sadly, this week she has day camp all week, so all I’m needed for is picking her up. But I’m already thinking ahead to the last week of summer and I’ve started lining things up to keep us amused.

I’ve bought a second tie dye kit, this one using liquid dye. And I’ve got a couple of things I bought online coming, specifically to use the dye on. And I’d like to pick up some proper clay. If we had fun with the foamy stuff, think what we could do with real clay! And we can always make more jewelry – she hasn’t seen half of the do-dads I have to make jewelry with.

I hope this week goes quickly. I’m kind of looking forward to my final week of crafting with the granddaughter.

Miscellaneous Monday

Nowhere else can one find so miscellaneous, so various, an amount of knowledge as is contained in a good newspaper.
— Henry Ward Beecher

While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
— Daniel J. Boorstin

Miscellaneous Thoughts:
Give me a home where the buffalo roam and I will give you boredom and isolation.
Want to go to Mars? Spend a week in Red Rock Canyon.
Blueberry muffins last longer because you can't tell when they're moldy.
I came in piece, please assemble.
― Kalifer Deil

Normally when I really don’t have much to talk about I just skip this post altogether, but I didn’t want to do that. I may not have something interesting enough to write an entire post about, but I have a bunch of little stuff.

First we have the weather. How crazy has this been?

We’ve had record breaking heat and insane humidity for a couple of weeks now. What rain we were getting not only did not cool things down, but served only to make the humidity worse. How hot was it? Even the squirrels were melting.

Saturday morning we finally got rain that took the moisture out of the air instead of adding to it. It lasted well into the afternoon but then the sun came out and the temperature dopped as well. That night was the first one in weeks where I could have the windows open and the air conditioning turned off.

But seriously, what’s up with the weather? It seems as though if a place isn’t getting record breaking heat, it’s getting forest fires or floods. Sometimes back to back. Nova Scotia went from wild fires to flooding in the space of a heart beat. I hear Florida is so hot, the temperature of the ocean there registered 100 Fahrenheit. There’s concern that the heated water is going to kill the coral reefs. Death Valley reached 138 Fahrenheit. Where's it going to end?

Penelope has had a couple of run-ins with the hubby, but she still comes to visit in the mornings. She was a little stand offish at one point, but she got over that pretty quickly. Usually the squirrels and birds fight over whatever she leaves in her plate. She doesn’t leave much though, so this morning I took pity on them and filled the bird feeder, leaving some peanuts in the shell on the patio.

The blue jays weren’t interested in posing for me, they were more interested in food and wouldn’t keep still.

The cardinal also wasn’t interested in posing, and took off as soon as he saw me with the phone.

And later in the morning I caught this guy doing his acrobatics to reach the seed in the feeder.

And one morning a few weeks ago I caught this guy on the telephone pole. He, also, declined a photo op, and kept circling the pole as he pecked away.

The kittens are still growing. We figure their birthday is mid-August, so I’ll probably wait a couple of weeks and do a proper post about them then. But in the meantime, to give you an idea of how much they’ve grown . . . here’s a picture of Dinsdale as a kitten:

And here’s a more recent picture of him:

And they’re still growing! They’re certainly not babies anymore.

Blueberries were on sale last week, so naturally I bought some and made a batch of blueberry jam. It takes eight cups of berries to make a batch of jam, and I didn’t realize the pints held about a cup and a half of berries. So I ended up with four cups extra. Now, I could have just made a batch and a half, but where’s the fun in that?

After doing much research on the internet to see what fruit paired well with blueberries, I finally settled on peaches, so my second batch of jam was a spiced peach and blueberry jam. This makes six different kinds of jam I’ve made so far this year.

Aside from making jam, I’ve also been working away at my stitchery, but nothing that’s finished enough to take a picture of. And of course I’ve been looking after the granddaughter. Only a couple of days a week so far, but this week I get her every day.

There are three secrets to looking after her: crafts, the pool, and Disney+. I’ve got it covered, easy peasy. :-)

Macerate Monday

macerate ~ to steep or soak; to break up; to emaciate

Timing is everything.

Last week the hubby and I took the grandbaby to Riverview Park and Zoo, which is about a 45 minute drive north. Or at least it is when you don’t run into detours and construction. I don’t know what it is about Peterborough, but the north side of the city seems to have been under construction for the last several years. I don’t mean houses so much, although it does appear to be spreading westward, but the roads.

I get admiration from passengers on how well I know the city, but trust me, it’s not because of any great love for it, it’s because I need to know the different routes for getting from point A to point B (like night school or a writers group meeting) just in case the one I’m most familiar with is blocked.

Anyway, we made it there eventually and that’s where my timing went off. We didn’t have a picnic lunch with us, we figured we’d stop at some point for take-out. It was close enough to lunch that we should have done this before we went to the zoo.

Also, it was a beautiful summer day so the place was packed – it’s a free zoo with a splash park and playground attached, why wouldn’t it be? We had to park several miles away and hike in (okay, I might be exaggerating just a little, but we weren’t exactly close).

We meandered along, making note of the snack shop and seeing very few animals because they were mostly hiding from the heat, and at the farthest end of the park was a small train. Grandbaby and I waited 45 minutes in line for a 10 minute ride. Hubby opted to just sit and wait for us in the shade.

Then we meandered back to the snack shop where they gouged us for a very unhealthy lunch. Fortified, we continued checking out the animals, at which point my camera let me know the battery was just about dead. The irritating part about that was that I have a spare battery, I just didn’t have it with me.

Unfortunately, by the time we got back to the gift shop near the playgrounds, there wasn’t any time to actually play. So I bought the grandbaby a stuffed otter (she really liked the otters) and we headed for home with the promise we’d bring her back some time so she could splash and play.

As I said, it’s a small zoo and there wasn’t a huge variety of animals, but the price was right (if you don’t count the lunch). While it was a little disappointing our timing was off so there was no time for splashing or playing, the grandbaby didn’t seem to mind – she had a great time.

And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

Monodont Monday

monodont ~ one-tusked

Technically, this is part two of last week’s post.

For those of you who missed it, a quick recap. We’ve had an above-ground pool for over 20 years and it needed to be replaced. Now that the hubby’s retired he didn’t just want a pool, he wanted a POOL. It might have been cheaper to go with an in-ground pool, but we aren’t able to do that because of the septic bed in the back yard.

When we bought this house, our neighbourhood was part of Hamilton Township, not the Town of Cobourg (which is why we had septic tanks instead of sanitary sewers). The first thing they did when they annexed us into the town is give us sanitary sewers (which we had to pay for) but we didn’t have to remove the septic tanks, just fill them up with approved filler and leave them in the ground. Had we removed it, we probably could have put in an in-ground pool, but that’s really, really expensive.

Anyway, when we put in the original pool the rules for such things were more relaxed. Fences only needed to be so high and they weren’t picky about what they’re made of. So we had a mixture of wooden, chainlink, and lattice (for the part at the front of the house to make it look pretty).

That ugly wooden fence had been there when we bought the house, but we added the chain link at the back when we got the first pool. There was chainlink and an ugly rail fence along the other side, but I didn’t think to get a picture of it before it was torn down. Nor did I get a picture of the lattice.

So that was the fencing we had. Now to tear it all down:

Notice the nice roll of chain link in the first picture. :-)

Now it was time to put up the new fence. We decided on wood for one side and the back. After the hubby put down the non-refundable deposit for the pool and arranged to have proper fencing put in (I think the chain link was only about 4 feet high and it needed to be 5), he went to the town for the permit.

Uh oh. Apparently the town’s website was out of date and the rules had changed. Fencing for pools now had to be 6 feet high for pools. Chain link had to be within a certain size of mesh, and the wooden fencing had to be made with vertical boards, not horizontal. If we wanted the decorative lattice on top, that had to be beyond the 6 foot mark.

It would have been so much cheaper to go with wooden fencing around the whole yard, but the neighbours on the west side have a huge vegetable garden and we didn’t want to block the morning sun from their garden. I’ll tell you this though, those neighbours better be planning to stay for a good long while because the posts for the chain link were driven down 3 feet and set in cement, so there’ll be no taking down that fence.

It was surprising how quickly the back fence went up. There are actually two guys working, one is behind the fence.

The hubby was careful taking down the old wooden fence because he was hoping to repurpose as many of the boards as possible into the new fence. However, once we saw how nice the back fence looked I couldn’t stand the thought of that beautiful wood getting covered with that ugly reddish brown stain so I talked him into going with all new wood for the side fence too.

They were done the back fence in a day. Then they were back the next day to sink the posts for the side fence and once the cement was dry framed it in so the hubby could do the rest himself.

This is a picture of the Bill the fence guy and the hubby working in the rain. Bill was only supposed to do the framing, but he stayed long enough to help the hubby with several sections, just to give him a head start and make sure he knew what he was doing.

And here are the finished fences:

And what happened to the wood the hubby saved? Never fear. There’s still the playhouse he promised the grandbaby he’d build her.

But that’ll be a post for another day. :-D