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flemmings ([personal profile] flemmings) wrote2011-07-16 10:27 pm
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Of plums and dreams and bugs


1. I read a book in one day for Read A Book In One Day Day. But it was only an Imogen Quy mystery and still took me all afternoon.

2. Every evening I go out and water my lettuce, and my petunia plant, and my s-i-l's plants in baskets and her tubs of basil and her tubs of cherry tomatoes, because in this heat they're all always dry by day's end, and I give the grass some water as well, though it's past praying for. Then I pick up the plums, counting them as a sort of meditation exercise. I did this last night. I did the plums again this afternoon. I counted 160 of them in various degrees of plumdom and prunitude, before I stopped. That's a feck of a lot of plums. I fill plastic bags with them and put the bags in my freezer and then I drop them all in the green bin Monday night. I hope the plum harvest will be over soon because my freezer is getting rather full.

3. Last night was still cool enough to use the thicker summer quilt and sleep bug in a rug and dream of an old college friend living with her cranky female partner and inexplicable five or six children in a gloomy theological college. Friend was anxious about the effect partner's mood was having on me, and partner was burdened by the cares of administering a theological college: which is not like either of them.

4. We enter the season of mysterious puncture wounds that scab over and mysterious bruises on my arms. I'm convinced that both are down to bug bites, but I never see the bugs that are the cause.

[identity profile] avalonjones.livejournal.com 2011-07-17 02:32 am (UTC)(link)
I hate the mosquitos here with a passion. Their voices seem to be higher up the ultrasonic scale than US mosquitos, so I generally can't hear them. They seem to find my blood very delicious, and my body reacts very strongly to them--the bites itch most horribly, and they bleed and scab over and leave big scars. On the other hand, I haven't been bitten by one yet this year, and I wonder if I might have Kage to thank for that--we've seen him hunting and catching flies, so I wonder if he might feel the same way about mosquitos.

It's been so hot here I can't even think.

[identity profile] flemmings.livejournal.com 2011-07-17 02:41 am (UTC)(link)
I feel for you most deeply, both the bugs-- but go Mighty Hunter Kage!!- and the heat, and the reported cutbacks on available AC power as well. Survive. Typhoon season must come eventually.

[identity profile] i-am-zan.livejournal.com 2011-07-17 10:20 am (UTC)(link)
I have had some dreaming nights in the last week too. I'm putting it down to the heat. We're not to humid these few days. So I'm at least grateful for that.

Hope the bug season goes away ... maybe it is tiny tiny bugs, when you're out and about in the garden.

Hmmm anyone you know that can make plum jam that they could then sell at a charity bazaar?


[identity profile] flemmings.livejournal.com 2011-07-17 12:38 pm (UTC)(link)
Bug season goes with cool weather. One must be patient.

The plums that fall are either unripe or over-ripe. Otherwise yes, I would make plum jam, like my s-i-l did two years back. Or wouldn't actually, because it's too hot for it. Two years ago (sighs in reminiscence) was a cool July with lows of a blessed 13 degrees.