Sweet, sweet, sweet corn season

The best way to eat sweet corn, of course, is to chomp on one buttered ear after another while  standing up in a field with your closest high-school friends and listening to a bluegrass band singing "Just a Bowl of Butter Beans," but since you're not a teenager anymore and online "research" reveals that the Zellwood Sweet Corn Festival ceased operations in 2013, you'll have to go with the next-best way to eat sweet corn--start the water boiling on the stove first and then run down to your garden to pick a dozen ears, shuck 'em, and then plunge 'em into the water within minutes of removal from the stalk.

But if you don't have a garden or your corn patch is not yet producing or, tragically, the raccoons have removed every single ear (it happens!), the next-best way to eat sweet corn is to drive a few miles up the road to a farmstand surrounded by cornfields and pick out a dozen ears that have been picked that very morning and then drive home and cook the ears within a few hours of being removed from the cornfield. Brilliantly yellow, sweet, and crisp, they taste like summer and sunshine, and even if there are only two people at the table, a dozen ears won't last long.

That's life (and death) in the slow lane

I wonder how many times the checkout clerk at the grocery store has to listen to the same complaints about the weather? Nothing but hot hot hot all day long, and once you've covered the heat, you can move on to the humidity.

I've been watching the bottlebrush buckeye finally start to bloom and today I decided to go outside and see what sorts of pollinators I could photograph--but first I had to stand around and wait for the camera's lens to adjust to the outdoor temperature. The minute I stepped out the door, the lens fogged up. 

Only a few of the bottlebrushes are blossoming, so I stood near a cluster and waited for the pollinators to come to me. No hummingbird moths so far although I saw one this morning at one of our flowerpots on the porch. I did, however, enjoy watching a zebra swallowtail flit from one flower to the next, never alighting anywhere for long. I saw some wasps and bees but didn't hear the incessant buzzing sound that surrounds that bush when it's fully in bloom. A day or two from now it'll be alive with buzzing things.

Meanwhile, some of the denizens of our demesne are no longer alive and buzzing--or clucking, as the case may be. A raccoon ravaged the chicken run the other night, escalating the ongoing man vs. raccoon war. The chicken run has been reinforced and raccoon traps have been distributed. Current score: a half dozen missing or dead chickens and one deceased raccoon.

Finally, our son returns tonight from his two weeks in South Africa. I asked him to smuggle out a giraffe but how would he fit it in his carry-on bag? He'll be exhausted after spending the better part of 24 hours in transit, but it will be good to see the social butterfly coming home to roost. 

 

I'm melting, I'm melting!

The problem with working in overly air conditioned offices is that stepping outside the building feels like walking into a solid wall of heat. Yesterday I was carrying heavy things across campus and I honestly wanted to lie down and melt into the pavement--much easier than trying to breathe in that heat.

But I felt more sorry for the very competent and highly qualified job candidate who gave a fine presentation yesterday. We'd been warned in the morning that the College would try to save energy by cutting back on the air conditioning in the hottest part of the day--exactly when this visiting candidate's presentation was scheduled. 

The room was crowded. 

The candidate was wearing a long-sleeved dress shirt and tie.

The presentation, as mentioned, was excellent, but I was distracted by the progress of the sweat marks slowly spreading down this poor man's shirt. By the end of the hour he looked as if someone had doused him with champagne in premature celebration--but the fact that he performed so valiantly under hostile circumstances suggests that he's equipped to endure the trials of administrative service.

I, on the other hand, am preparing to endure the trials of administrative gobbledegook. This morning I'm presenting some committee-constructed prose to the Powers That Be and steeling myself for their responses. Earlier in this process, very passionate people told me, "If you take out the phrase 'liberal arts,' you'll destroy the College," while others said, "If you include the phrase 'liberal arts,' you'll destroy the College." Can't please both of those parties, and it's wearing me out trying.

But at least I don't have to present this prose in a sweltering room. In fact, given the indoor conditions in campus buildings, I'd better take a sweater. 

Summer is icumen in

This is the forest primeval I thought as I walked carefully through the mud into our upper woods this morning, except it's not the forest primeval--it's just a little fringe of woods at the edge of the upper meadow, with the early light filtering through the pines in a way that made it look lovely, dark, and deep.

The mud was deep and slippery thanks to recent frequent storms, but it ought to dry out this weekend as the heat wave hits. I made it to the Farmers Market before 9 a.m. this morning but still had to retreat to a shady spot to chat with a friend. Hot hot hot! Our electricity supplier has warned us to expect brown-outs as everyone who wants to keep comfortable cranks up the AC.

But it felt good to be out and about this morning. I saw a flicker and some hummingbirds, heard the kingfishers down by the creek, visited the chickens and admired the sun shining through sycamore leaves. Now, though, I'm staying indoors. After a long wet spring, the summer sun has come to stay.

 

The wild columbines make these lovely seed pods.

Sentinel beneath the birdfeeders.

That beeping stinking blasted ARGH

Everything is upside-down this week: My house is eerily quiet while my building on campus is abuzz with incessant beeping. I'm supposed to be at home doing whatever one does while builders tear a bathroom down to the studs, but instead I'm in my office trying to get a little work done despite the annoying alarm that keeps sounding for no apparent reason. What happened?

To no one's surprise, the bathroom project has been delayed. I knew the whole process seemed to be moving too smoothly! The tub is on backorder and won't arrive until late next week, but the grandkids will be here for two weeks starting July 1 and, given their predilection for playing in the filthy creek and working in the garden, we will need two functioning bathrooms during their visit. So the bathroom renovation has been rescheduled to begin July 14, at which point I'll be on the highway driving the imps back to their own house.

You will recall, however, that I spent a ridiculous amount of time last week clearing EVERY SINGLE STINKING THING out of the kids' bathroom, but now I'm going to need to put many stinking things back in there. Not all. In the process of cleaning, I located a stash of old curling irons and some other things we really don't need, which will be going to the Goodwill. I will put towels and soap and so on back in there, and someone is going to have to put up that blasted shower curtain--but not until I buy new hooks. I refuse to wrestle with those horrible old hooks ever again.

Meanwhile, my husband has been wrestling with the incessant issue of raccoon visits--this time in broad daylight. The squirrel baffle doesn't deter them at all, but at least this time the raccoon didn't disassemble the birdfeeders. We have two new feeders out there that may be more difficult for raccoons to open--or maybe it's just a matter of time. 

Given the raccoons' manual dexterity, maybe I'll ask them to put up the shower curtain. It's time the raccoons contributed something to the household.

Go ahead, make yourself at home.

  

And in other news....

Because it's Friday and I need a break between cleaning guest rooms to prepare for grandkids and clearing EVERY SINGLE STINKING THING out of the bathroom to prepare for demolition day, here are some news items you may have overlooked: 

According to the History Blog, some folks were digging at the site of a Roman fort near Hadrian's Wall and unearthed "Footwear of unusual size." (No word on whether any rodents of unusual size were skulking thereabouts.) How unusual? Men's size 13, which suggests that if my son had been living in Northumberland 2000 years ago, he'd have found appropriate footwear. This "honker of a leather sole," as the article calls it, "may be the largest one in the Vindolanda Trust's collection of more than 5,000 shoes." I'll be Imelda Marcos is green with envy.

Meanwhile in Ohio, the Cincinnati Enquirer informs us that some local dude was just driving down the road minding his own business when a cicada flew in an open window, startling the driver. His frantic attempts to remove the cicada led him to lose control, veer off the road, and hit a pole. According to the police, "the suspect fled the scene." 

I've endured mice and spiders in my car without catastrophe but I'm not sure how I would respond to a cicada. A rare Antarctic squid would be another matter entirely: National Geographic reports that a three-foot-long very colorful squid never before seen alive swam into a submersible's camera range around 7000 feet below sea level. The "elusive cephalopod" was previously known only from bits that got snagged in fishermen's nets, and squids are, in general, not known to sit for photos: "Deep-sea squids have good eyesight and usually avoid the lights of a research vessel," reports NatGeo, and one scientist added, "'We want to see them, but they probably don't want to see us most of the time.'" 

I don't know about you, but I could watch the video of that "elusive cephalopod" all day long--certainly more fun than clearing out all the miscellaneous items that have accumulated under our bathroom sink for the past two decades. (Have you had a good look under your bathroom sink lately? Yuck.) 

Also, The Elusive Cephalopod would be a great name for a garage band.

A blast from the past at the end of my road

A long time ago in a used-car lot far, far away, a man tried to sell me a Thunderbird. 

I didn't want a Thunderbird. I just needed a small used family car to replace the Honda Civic wagon I'd totaled, although saying I had totaled it suggests some culpability on my part. I was just driving, slowly, on a village street in Nicholasville, Kentucky, with my small daughter strapped into he carseat in the back, when a 17-year-old girl driving a borrowed Firebird ran a red light and smashed into my car. Not my fault!

But nevertheless I bore the responsibility for finding a new car as quickly as possible while my husband was immersed in final exams for his seminary classes. So while he crammed and studied and scribbled, I hauled our toddler daughter across multiple used-car lots in and around Lexington, Kentucky.

This was in the late 1980s, when Martha Layne Collins was governor of Kentucky, suggesting that a majority of voters believed that women could do serious work independent of their husbands. However, a majority of used-car salesmen in and around Lexington did not believe that a woman encumbered by a toddler was capable of selecting a used car without her husband's approval: Why don't you come back when your husband can come with you, sweetheart?

I told every salesman the same thing: I was looking for a used minivan with the lowest mileage we could find within our meager budget. "I've got just what you need," said one salesman before leading me and my squirming toddler over to a used Thunderbird convertible, pale yellow and pristine but not by any means a minivan.

Recently someone parked a used Thunderbird convertible at the end of our road with a big "For Sale" sign on it, and every time I see it I think of the clueless salesmen who thought he could talk me into spending a pile of money on the extreme opposite of what I'd asked for.  I didn't buy it then and I'm not buying it now, even if it features a red leather interior. But every time I see it, I think of that salesman and hope he'll eventually work his way out of Sales Purgatory, where salesmen who can't listen desperately try to sell worthless garbage to customers with empty pockets.