Summer Solstice: The Beginning of Long Days, Short Nights

Summer Solstice, Sun Rising in Northeast over Long Point

Winter Solstice, Sun Rising to the Southeast over Giarizzo's

Solstice, according to Borland, means the sun (sol) stands still (stice), although the sun never does stand still, just appears to.  It begins today, at 1:16 PM, Eastern Standard Time according to Wikipedia.  The sun rose at 5:41, sets at 8:57 but dusk will continue till 9:30 or so.  I am not sure how they measure sunrise or setting, as it rose over Long Point this morning around 6:00, not 5:41 which is what the Weather site tells me.  When I read Borland yesterday, he talked about he Whippoorwill, a bird you rarely if ever see but that it sings all night.  Evie looked it up on her IPAD app, an amazing app, and we were able to hear it's call and are sure it's what wakes us often at night.  Unfortunately, I cannot get this app for my AirMac though that may be a good thing as Evie cannot figure out how to turn of the whippoorwill's call, which is driving us nuts.  They time their babies birth so it's ten days before a full moon.  They sleep most of the day, sing all night and are called the Nightjar in Great Britain.  There scientific name means goatsucker, because they haunted herds of goats at night and were believed to live on their milk.  Later, they learned that they lived on insects and followed the goat herds because they attracted such insects.  Interesting?  Perhaps.

Last night we went to a meeting of the Chautauqua Lake Association at the Lakewood Rod and Gun Club.  Sort of a boring night, of budgets, the need for more money, with nothing on whether there's any progress being made on the health of the lake.  Because of budget cuts, they will have to leave in dry dock a number of cutters, about half, which means the lake clean up will be half as effective as last year. The most important fact is that neither New York State nor the surrounded areas contribute anything to the lake's health yet it's essential to the financial health of the area.  One of the Trustees, in the newsletter, compared Lake Chautauqua to a highway.  You don't neglect highways, but constantly keep them up, designate money for their upkeep, which is the way we should look at the lake.  We will have to change the culture of the lawmakers to create this change in mindset.  Evie did connect with a couple of people on the Board and is going to a meeting Thursday morning to coordinate neighborhoods who wish to cut their own weeds, like us.  They will set dates when they will send a truck around to a neighborhood to pick up the weeds, a much cheaper and more efficient way of picking up weeds from neighborhoods.  Sending a barge over, for example, from their headquarters to our house would take 45 minutes one way, 45 minutes back, just to pick up weeds from one yard.  Evie will make sure this program is effective.  We also got talking with a couple, Charlie and Ruth Ann Mc Chestney, who talked about composting their weeds.  They invited us to stop over at their house on Summit, on the lake in Lakewood, and see how they did it.  It's a lovely Victorian house, divided in half actually, set on the lake, with a panoramic view of the lake, perhaps the wides I have seen.  They literally look straight at the bridge, but it's so far away, at the narrows, that you can hardly see it.  It's amazing how different each house's view of the lake is.  Anyways, there were really nice, showed us how his pile of weeds at the shoreline, had become rich compost.  They told us a little about themselves; Ruth Ann' husband died in the 90's and she met Charlie on the Internet over a Christian singles site.  They married in 2000 and have been happily together for eleven years.  She sings in the Chautauqua choir.  They live outside Pittsburgh in Mars, and Charlie has a cabin in Maine.  I guess we learned quite a bit about them.  I think we would get along as Charlie mentioned listening to NPR.

Today, we will continue to wait and see if we get our Septic Tank put in.  Some how neither of us is very confident that Roger Vallencourt, will come.