I braved the afternoon heat for a few minutes of weeding while watching for the FedEx truck. Beneath the weeds I found…a volunteer basil plant! Yay!

On another note, the guy who’s perennially on our not-our-favorite-neighbor list put himself at the top of it again this year when I noticed him training their new pooch (one of those mushed-face pant-pant varieties) to use our yard and not his.

I laid low today, hoping to throw off this crud (no fever cold) I’ve been fighting off for days. I would have been happier feeling better and rambling in the woods finding wildflowers like this bunchberry (Cornus canadensis, an important forage plant for herbivores in some ecosystems) I spotted the other day. Here’s hoping the cough-sniff-arrgh lifts tomorrow; I’m done with it.

Finally: cool enough today to tackle outdoor chores toward the strenuous end of the difficulty scale. By mid-afternoon, however, pretty toasty in the sun.

My main morning project was planting the giant potentilla we got yesterday from the neighborhood landscaping place. I would have gotten a smaller pot if they had it, but on the other hand, when planted, this one was pretty darned fulfilling. You can see from the shadow, I was out early. This was at 8:14am.

The Botanist always said dig a $5 hole for a 50¢ plant. I got maybe half-way to that ratio. Inflation?

It was a deep hole, and I did Dad’s trick of setting the sod aside, and when the hole was finished, lining the bottom with it, grass side down. Makes a sponge-like reservoir. Dry as it is, that’s a good plan, although the roots aren’t really down there yet. In fact, the soil was so dry that I watered the area around the hole as well as the fresh soil I dumped in the hole around the root ball.

Landscapers and botanists usually call this plant potentilla, but it’s commonly called cinquefoil, with cinque meaning five, and foil referring to leaf/leaves.

Shopping in a store you don’t normally visit, in a different area than you usually shop, increases the potential for finding items new to you. I’m heh-heh stumped about this. The words are clear; the meaning is easy to guess, but the utility of the product, even 100% real and natural, escapes me.

These labels, on the other hand, are extremely clear. The Logo-Guru approved. Interesting: all are the same proof, but the prices range from $31.99—vodka and rum—to $51.99—bourbon, with gin and clear whiskey in the $30s. So many mysteries in the world….

Quick plant report: this is one of the most drought-and-heat stressed specimens of lupine I’ve seen so far this season on the farm. Too early for this deep a dry spell.

Got the macro out. Of course, a flower. And of course the flower had an insect. Package deal!

My second time at the Droney flight controls, this time longer than a minute. And here’s my first Droney photo.

Beware: the future may bring more Drone-photos!

I give thee the common name grey dumpling puffball (approximately golfball-sized).

Darned muggy today, and too hot to cook, really. But I had a chunk of pork shoulder that needed to be prepared—didn’t want to do the freeze/thaw dance with it, and besides we did need something for our Saturday night meal. I managed to turn it into simple-recipe stovetop BBQ without overly heating the house. Trick: I started early, and by 9am the pot was turned down to simmer, and by noon, the pot was in the fridge so I could remove (some of) the partly congealed fat before reheating it for dinner. Yum.

As I put skin cream on them earlier, I thought a bit about hangnails. Not a hot topic, I know, but they are curious things…a little extra skin growth, not enclosing the body as it normally does. Somehow, when you clip off the hangnail and cease antagonizing the area, it’ll go back to being flat skin. Me, I get hangnails when I do a lot of cooking/cleaning and my hands are wet, kinda-wet, damp, a bit dry, that kind of thing for a while. We did a bunch of cooking on Sunday and Monday, and presto! I have hangnails all over. They’re healing, however, as I’ve kept my hands out of water (mostly) since Monday…and also the cream.

So, I’ll try for a tenuous parallel: the aphids are so dense on some of the lupines that there is a sap-fall on the leaves…at least, that’s my interpretation of this scenario. The parallel falls apart when you consider that this lupine’s aphid density is ever so much higher than my hangnail count, and thus the affliction is a greater problem for the lupine(?).

Out of curiosity, do other primates suffer from hangnails?

Lordy, lordy, we were in the vortex of people-here/people-leaving. This clover-visitor was off that axis.

The peonies in our part of the property are darned perky. The earliest bloomers are already fading toward white/the lightest pink. Cycle of life.

Have I noted this before? Show-stopping light here!

Missing our now-absent visitors and the one we saw briefly today…sigh—moving on. Luv.

Train and…reflections.

Fern and…forest-floor floral friend.

Waterfall and…reflection.

Stars and…you know.

Lovely day to take a long, slow train trip, a slightly hustling walk (The Foot, of course) during…intermission(?), and the same long, slow train trip back. Not a loop; instead, an up-and-back.

In a foreign country!

Great fun!