A Rainy Saturday Begins The Weekend

6:14

9:00

I was up at 6:15, stepped outside, checked the rain gauge, and a quarter of an inch had fallen overnight.  There's an uncomfortable southeasterly wind, strong enough to knock over our 15-year-old dwarf Myer Lemon tree which was sitting in a pot in our yard.  The lake's surface is ruffled, the wind howls, the purple martins hunker down in our martin house.  No fishing boats out yet despite it being a weekend.

Purple Martin Pair

Yesterday morning was full, as I wrote the blog, got in a paddle, all before 9:00 when I drove off to Erie with Stan for breakfast at Bob Evans with some summer basketball friends from Cleveland.  We meet periodically during the year, usually in Erie, in Chautauqua during the summer.  It's a trip back to the good old days, our neighborhoods, basketball courts, mostly our lives in high school and college, before we started working.  And of course, we brag about our kids and now our grandkids.  It's fun, we sit around drinking coffee after the Sun Rise Special (two eggs, over easy, sausage, hash browns, and biscuits).  Stan and I were early, so we made a quick stop at Home Depot and I picked up four bags of mulch, then arriving at Bob Evans just as our buddies arrived, good timing.

I was home by 9:30, after dropping Stan off and the house was empty because Evie was at PT, then shopping.  I was exhausted, mostly from getting up so early, so I took a long nap, waking just as Evie returned home, around 2:15.  She had stopped at the Lighthouse and picked up one of their rotisserie chickens for dinner.  She had, earlier, before PT, done some weeding in the garden but we also ended up spending the afternoon out there as well, getting rid of weeds, mulching areas that were difficult to mow.  Evie has figured out a way to work in the garden while protecting her back by wearing her brace and sitting among the plants. Things are shaping up, the dahlias are beginning to pop out of their pots, and the petunias are planted in the planters.  We finished off the day by digging up a number of Jerusalem artichoke plants for Linda and Ron's creek bank once again.  They were washed away by a heavy flooding of Clear Creek this past fall.

We then spent an hour out on the dock with a beer and appetizer, hummus with pita chips, admiring the pleasantness and our industry the past couple of days, knowing it was going to rain over the weekend.  Around 6:30, the wind picked up enough so we became chilly, so we came in and Evie cut up some cauliflower, added potatoes, and roasted them in the oven for dinner.  With the chicken and a salad, we had an easy dinner.  We watched the usual, finished up the series SAFE and finally found out who the killer was, no obvious clues, of course!   It's not our favorite series but we stuck with it.