July Blahs

If all goes well, this entry should be accompanied by a photo of the first fruits picked from my summer garden.  Two cucumbers and a trio of cherry tomatoes will debut and be consumed shortly.  There are a few more cucumbers growing on the vine outside our living room window, but I will let them ripen a few more days until they turn a dark green in their entirety.  At the moment they are green at one end, but still yellow at the other end.

I have very good luck with cucumbers, and in fact my luck is too good. I use them in my tossed salad, but I could only use one cuke in a week even if I eat a salad every day.  Then if I did that I would end up spending a small fortune in lettuce.  I end up with many more cukes then I need.  Most of my harvest will be taken into work for distribution to whoever wants to make a salad for their dinner.

I am grateful that my garden is doing so well, but otherwise I am in the grip of the summer blahs.  This morning so far has not been hopeful.   We invested in a new type of some sort of cooking utensil which resembles a cast iron griddle with a handle, but in fact is called comal or some such hi-tech name.  I tried griddling pancakes on this morning.  I don’t know what the main selling point of the product is supposed to be, but ease of cooking is not one of them.   I ended up scraping my corn cakes off with a metal spatula and a good amount of elbow grease.  The result was a pile of cooked corn meal which in no way resembled pancakes.  Sorry, I did not snap a photo of this gourmet disaster to display beside my cukes.  Readers will just have to use their own imaginations.

I will give the device one more chance to redeem itself, but I won’t try it today.

The morning also started with the loud barking of two dogs that live two doors down from us.  The curs!  Don’t they know it’s Sunday morning and the humans in their neighborhood have no use for their loud yapping at this time of the week?  Then I noticed why they were barking: the neighborhood fox trotted through my backyard like he was teasing his very distant cousins yapping away at him.  I yelled my customary “SCRAM” to the fox through my open window and he disappeared somewhere in the field behind our house.

The dogs barking were a rude awakening (literally) for Warrior Queen, who slept in well past her customary wake up time of 7:00.  She growled as to why the dogs were barking.  I explained that they were barking at a predator and offered her morning “happy juice”.  She is fine now.

The blahs are this season accompanied by an overall sense of neighborhood melancholia.  Neighbors on both sides of our dwelling have separated.  The wives from both unions decided at some point after their marriages of 15-20 years that they have had enough and moved on to what they believe are greener pastures. We’ve helped out the abandoned spouses as much as we can, but somehow we can’t help getting drawn into the same emotions that they are experiencing.

Damn you, empathy!

Then there is another friend of mine who has an incurable, ultimately terminal condition.  He moved to the other side of the county a few years ago, close to a number of friends who look after him, but otherwise he lives alone with a cat.   All of his friends near and far got into the habit of calling him at intervals just to see if he was all right.  I have made my customary call during the last three weeks, left messages on his cell phone, but have not gotten a return call or a message on our answering machine.

Naturally, my mind races to the worst possible conclusion that the inevitable has happened and we have no way to find out.  We don’t have the phone numbers of his other friends to see if they have heard from him in the last few weeks.  I am hoping that he has been so busy helping another friend who was planning to move in with him temporarily at the end of last month, and that it is nothing more than this keeping him from answering my messages. This all adds up to blah.

Still, it’s a beautiful Sunday morning with a forecast of lower temperatures and humidity.  I have my garden to weed and feed and grass to mow.  I have plenty to keep myself busy and allow the other dramas to play out to their inevitable conclusion.

And I will have a nice salad to eat in the meantime…and I am grateful for that.

(Thank you for reading.  Hoping everyone is a having a warm, but not too warm, season.)