Summer Wanes!

Well, I'm back, if anyone is watching. July was a busy month, but nothing too interesting happened, thus the lack of posts.

Our daughter, Shimmy, and her family flew in from L.A. on the first of July. Sysguy stayed a week, but Shimmy and the Things stayed for 3 weeks. Mostly they stayed with Cricket at her place 'cause that's where all the kid stuff is... swimming pool, water slide, play set, and Crickets 3 kids! Thing 1 and Scooter got along famously, as did Thing 2 and Sweetie Pie. Cutie Pie just played with whoever would let her, which usually worked out OK.

We had a great visit with Shimmy - when she wasn't knitting. On her last weekend here, my sisters from UPstate visited as did Shimmy's old flame from her single days. Now he's been coming to see us about every summer. This is the first time their visits have coincided - he's from out of state - way out of state. He brought us some smoked, canned King salmon which he personally caught. They had a nice reunion, and spent a lot of time catching up an each other's lives. Shimmy was happy to have seen him. My sisters seemed to enjoy their visit and spent a lot of time with our grandchildren whom they don't see very often.

Now that everyone's gone, we can start working on our home projects!
We're getting tomatoes now, what a pleasure to taste real tomatoes again. The upside down beefsteaks aren't doing too well. Any fruit they've produced have suffered from serious blossom end rot. The Romas are producing a lot of fruit and starting to turn red. The grape and cherry varieties have been throwing red fruit for a week or so now. As usual, we have several volunteers from last year's plants, and they are also bearing good fruit.

Almost lost the potted flowers last week because I forgot to water before we went away for a couple days. They're still with us, but not looking as good as they did before.

Seems like ice cream making was the summer's big adventure. All 3 of our children expressed an interest in an ice cream maker attachment for their KitchenAid mixers. So that was the birthday gift of the year. We bought them each one and had it sent to their respective homes. We were also bitten by the ice cream bug and have made a few batches of it in different flavors; vanilla, chocolate malt, and English Toffee (Heath Bar bits). So far OK! The grand kids liked it well enough.