A Brilliant Morning Sun

6:54

7:05

It's 7:05 and the sun is filling the living room, blinding me if I sat on the loveseat.  It seems like quite a while since it has been this bright in the morning.  I was up at 6:40 to a clear blue sky and an empty, quiet lake.  That's changed now as the bass boats are emerging from their docks and marinas.  It's 8:45 and I just returned from a short paddle.  I missed an osprey, took photos of a raft of ducks, before paddling home in the sun and heat and humidity.  Another hot one today

Mallard

A Family Of Ducks

A Trio

Yesterday morning was a bit different from the usual Sunday.  I did get in a good, long paddle, getting home just before the seemingly blue skies started to disappear and the dark clouds moved in.  Around 10:00, we were sitting on the front porch, watching the rain pelt the lake, our chaise lounge fly into the lake, our yards flood with two inches of rain in forty-five minutes.  And the weather app forecast a slight chance of rain, with their usual accuracy!

After the deluge, it cleared up and the boats reappeared, and it was a typical Labor Day Sunday, where everyone who had a boat was one the lake except us.  We tend to avoid days like this and prefer sitting on the dock enjoying the traffic.  We then spent our morning getting ready for our picnic with our good friends, Bill and Joyce and Linda and Ron.  It was a fairly easy prep.  Evie made a teriyaki marinade for ribeye steaks, a salad dressing, and wrapped the corn in tin foil after I husked it.  I forgot that after the storm, I put on my bathing suit and jumped in the lake to retrieve our chaise lounge.  Fortunately, it does not float so I was able to find it near our dock.

We were then able to relax the rest of the afternoon.  Evie swam occasionally to cool off as the day turned hot and humid, just what we hoped to avoid for the picnic.  I read and am really enjoying Silva's THE OTHER WOMAN.  Linda and Ron arrived at 4:15 and we headed right out to the dock, enjoying a beer, appetizers, and the lake.  It was warm but bearable, the lake traffic heavy but mostly on the far side of the lake.  Bill and Joyce joined us at 5:00 on our porch and we sat there talking until 6:00 when I fired up the grill and roasted the corn for 20 minutes, turning it every few minutes.  Once that was done, Evie got things ready in the kitchen and Ron and I grilled the teriyaki steak.  Because I had it cut in quarter-inch slices, it took only a few minutes to grill each slice and we were done quickly.

Dinner 

 Dinner was inside, alas, as it was too hot outside.  Everyone loved the steak and Linda's famous potato salad, with mucho hard boiled eggs.  The corn was a bit overdone but still flavorful.  We ended the evening on the porch, with a peach crisp topped with ice cream, as the sky filled with fireworks, the neighborhood occasionally rocked by an earth-shattering boom.  It was not your usual cherry bomb...more like a bomb.  Everyone was tired and ready to head home by 9:00, so we said aloha and returned to the kitchen, washing and drying the dishes so we would not have to face the mess this morning.  For some reason, I was really tired and went up to bed early but Evie stayed up to watch some TV and relax before coming up.