Musings

Day drinking

Did that title catch your eye? What I mean is that the humidity and murkiness evident first thing in the morning (here), and obscuring the far shore, heralded in a hot, moist day, good for reading and low-key activities all afternoon. And sipping ice water…that kind of day-drinking.

My morning beach tour became a leech-hunting expedition. I found the Garish Green Sand Shovel mostly buried in the uppper-beach sand on my first tour. It’s perfect for leech-tossing. The storminess of previous days sent lots of the boneless critters toward the beach, where I pitched them onto the beach, then tossed them to the off-beach vegetation. I returned a bit later to get a second harvest, as I found so many on the first visit. I think the total was two dozen. No lie.

A VVVgood day

Potluck tonight. All good, as usual, with an outstanding tart cherry pie for dessert. Superlative.

The meal was followed by a peek at the stunning sunset.

Pacific, but not the Pacific

My, the lake was quiet this morning.

I even saw large bird tracks on the sand bottom. My bet is sandhill crane tracks.

Construction project

My theory is it’s just one crazy deer. A deer ate the trillium by the NW corner of the cottage. A deer ate the tops of the ferns in front of the cottage. A deer ate two of my in-bloom peonies (yesterday). A deer ate the tops of some of the lupines. None of this happened in any of the years I’ve been here. What gives? I think it’s one deer, and that animal is strange/barmy.

Not wanting to lose any more peonies, I used some of the branches we’ve cut out of the apple trees to make a kraal of sorts to protect a plant, not livestock, but you get the idea.

Various truths

Lighthouse sequence. The structure is on the end of a breakwater at the mouth of the Manistique River. It is 35 ft tall and made of steel. It was first lit in 1916, and automated in 1969. Safety first.

Wide angle.

Wide, with red osier dogwood in foreground.

Not so wide, with sign and seagull (or tern or whatever it is; we always called them gulls).

We encountered wet roads, then rain, on our return drive; however, no rain fell here at the cottage, sadly.

Marking time

The field before sun-crest.

The field after sun-crest.

Ferns in the woods.

Ferns by the cottage.

Chives, picked for tonight’s stew. [The flowers are for show; those stems are not tender enough to eat any more.]

Sun-shines

You can look at the early sun…

…and you can turn around and see what it’s lighting up.

Here’s late-day low-angle sun backlighting a rhubarb leaf.

It’s only right to celebrate the sun on the longest day of the year.

Working on new skills

I offer another attempt at capturing subtleties of the rising sun—less successful, yet with some unexpected details.

In the afternoon, I undertook a chore using a tool borrowed from our kind neighbor. I used it to prune wayward branches higher than I could reach from the ground. It has an extending handle, and the business end has a saw and a slicing mechanism activated by a rope, both VERY sharp and VERY effective. [Note that the plug-in hybrid is being charged…there’s no electricity in the garage, hence the temporary location by the cottage.]

A-round n a-bout

Lovely early sun…

…and pretty at the beach a bit later….

This busy bumbler was diving-for-apples head-dunking in these blossoms, one after the other. Despite multiple shots, I didn’t get a total head-immersion shot…but this’ll do.

Quiet moments

Drippy-rainy morning, with pink lupines…

…and aging dandelion blossoms….

Bonus: looking back west from the point, plus the foggy far shore.

Milkweed budding

A lighter moment with milkweeds budding [already]…

And, with more light, mayflies on the cottage door. [Not shown: seagulls swooping to snap up mayflies-in-motion.