Wet And Windless

6:18

It's 7:00 and I have been up since 6:15, listening to light rain on the roof, birds singing, and the annoying honking of Canadian geese.  It's a warm 62º but the temperature will drop slowly during the day to the 40's tonight.  We received an inch and a quarter of rain overnight and if it does not let up soon, I may have to skip my morning paddle.  I didn't but I started out in a drizzle and then it stopped though threatening and I finally got a photograph of a heron, standing at the outlet to Woodlawn Creek.

Kayaking Morning North

South

A Breakfasting Great Blue Heron

Yesterday was another good day for gardening until mid-afternoon when a brief shower sent both of us into the house.  I was able to get in a paddle before breakfast with the guys and before yoga.  We finished up the blog by 9:30 when I left for yoga and Evie went outside to continue her work in the garden.  As I walked into yoga, one of my fellow practitioners was walking out, angrily wondering when Danielle was getting back, our regular teacher who is on a four-week yoga retreat in India.  Our substitute teacher is fine, just different which may account for some people's displeasure.  Let it go.

On my way home, I picked up four more buckets of pea gravel and spread it out on our road.  Evie was making great progress in the garden, both pulling weeds and transplanting and finding perennials hidden by the plethora of spring weeds.  I decided to get another load of gravel before lunch so off I went, a three-mile drive shoveled the gravel into the buckets and headed up to spread on our road.  I am perhaps half done although one is never finished, the road could always use a couple more buckets.  When I was done, Evie had taken a break from the garden and made me of my favorite lunches, a salmon salad, with lots of vinegar.  Yum.  I watched another Bosch and have to admit I am getting the story mixed up with my last two books, also about detectives like Bosch.  I then tried to nap but ended up reading instead.  I find if I cannot nap, I also don't sleep as well at night.  Go figure.

Rain In The Afternoon

I went outside to help Evie at 3:00 but was waylayed by a squirrel, furiously feeding in the cage of our bird feeder.  I knocked on the window but nothing seemed to frighten him until I went outside and scared him away.  And just as I walked outside, it started to pour so I helped put away all our gardening stuff.  

Squirrel Cage

By 5:00, we were ready to drive to Erie, PA, because Evie wanted to visit Stan's Nursery on Buffalo Road near Harbour Creek, a suburb of Erie.  We found a very helpful and knowledgeable guy who took us to the fall-blooming clematis, what Evie wanted and we ended up with a couple of privets as well as five ivy geraniums for the flower boxes.  

Geraniums

We had planned our excursion so we could have dinner at one of Erie's oldest and most famous bars, The Plymouth Tavern on State Street.  It's a huge place, as they seemed to have put together three buildings, with two bars and a couple of areas for seating.  The one bar was noisy because of the soon to graduate students from Gannon College, nearby.  We chose the quiet but empty bar and took our time going through their extensive menu.  We ended up ordering burgers, mine the Cowboy, Evie's the veggie burger which did not look too appetizing but was surprisingly good.  We also had a couple of beers and the fries were hand-cut and plentiful, so much so we both left some on the table.  We ordered their specialty, a piece of cheesecake with a berry sauce on top, to go.  It was an easy forty-minute drive back to the lake, as the sky began to darken.

We ended the night as usual, with a boring Vice News and Colbert but a fun Rake, as Season Four begins with Cleaver Greene dangling from a rope as air balloon floats over Sydney, outrageous but fun.