I'm wearing white after Labor Day!!

Yes and don't try and stop me! Ugh, I haven't been feeling well and life has just been too boring. Sometimes it's hard to work up the energy to be interesting or interested , you know? We just lazed around the long weekend, mostly on the porch. The weather has been amazingly gorgeous, in the low high 70's. My plants are doing well and the trellis full of hot-pink Mandevilla is blooming like crazy. A neighbor stopped to compliment me and said: your flowers are beautiful, they look so real! Ha, nature imitating art? If only I could download the pictures to my laptop! So, Stinky BBQ'd, ( leftover BBQ'd onions, corn and zucchini with pasta for dinner tonight) we watched DVDs: 4 episodes of Deep Space 9, The Merchant of Venice****and Lemony Snicket*** and ate cake. (strawberry short) We had baseball tickets Sun night but I wasn't up to it. Why does everyone treat Labor day as the end of summer? There's 2 1/2 weeks left! I'm trying to maintain a mellow state and not cross the dreaded line into Grumpyville. Happily, we are planning a short trip elsewhere. For the High Holy Days we are going to The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland Ohio, where else? Holy is as holy does. We are driving the scenic route, across mostly Pennsylvania which should be green, lush and rolling. I'll see Lake Erie again. I've never been to Ohio-it's the Midwest! My only prior exposure was Minnesota in winter and that was great. I'm psyched.

More photos, B's 60th

You can see more photos if you click on the Flickr badge, (on the right)
on top where it says WWW. Flickr.
I can't add to or get rid of this stupid badge!!!!
Or this stupid underlining!

Sirius in August

My google homepage has quotes of the day. I never thought I'd be quoting Jimmy Buffett, but here you go: "If the phone doesn't ring, it's probably me". It's appropriate for me as I'm not a phone person but I am forever sending out psychic greetings. I know for a fact that some of you out there actually receive the message!
This photo is Barbara, me and Morgana last month in my backyard with my new fence. My tomatoes and cucumbers are waist-high now. Weeding, planting and weeding, that's what it's all about. I've been trying to reach a balance between activity and rest. Caramel's confinement has taught me a lesson. She is doing very well now and rarely coughs anymore, we have been able to lengthen our walks a little ever day and she has resumed running like a loony after sticks- but never bringing them back. It took a while but she's trained me to retrieve.
And so I'm mostly enjoying these doggy days of August.
On the 8th, there was a tornado in Brooklyn, our first ever, with winds of 135 MPH. What next, flying pigs? There was a lot of damage to houses and cars but luckily, no one was seriously hurt although Leif Erikson park lost 40% of it's trees. The tornado came across the Narrows from Staten Island. Figures.
We have been having increasingly torrential rains every year; despite all the work we do the basement is wetter every year. Is there any question that our climate is in crisis? There was about 4" of rain in less than an hour- the subways were flooded and and several lines shut down it, was chaos in NY.
And it happened on Barbara's 60th birthday, around the corner from her house, which was untouched. Coincidence? Who can say?
Barbara, my ex-cousin and oldest friend ( 43 years, from menstruation to menopause) is definitely a big blonde Norwegian force of nature. (She would object to the term goddess cause she's very superstitious- don't ask)
Luckily her party was on the previous Sunday, a wonderful BBQ in Trow's beautiful garden. Later in the evening, we each had a lobster. (Oh baby, that was good!) The bad thing was, the lobsters spent their day in the bath tub and every time I went to the bathroom, I could hear them. As they tried to breathe, their shells clicked. Eewww! Didn't you ever wonder what the first person to ever eat a shrimp or a lobster was thinking? Hmmm, that looks delicious!
My birthday (58th) was groovy and spanned an entire weekend.
I had dinner with my 97 year old aunt, and my Cousin Lorry, went for to the Poconos, visited a nursery, got some new perennials (oy, more work), stayed out late so we could see the Perseid meteor shower ( saw a couple), had a strawberry shortcake, got some great presents (Young Frankenstein, my favorite movie, is coming to Broadway and Steve got preview tickets!) and finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (Awesome!)
Fri, Bro and SIL came all the up from Philly for a Cyclones game- torrential rain again. Twice! We bagged it and had a lovely dinner in an uncharacteristically empty restaurant. Park Slope is wonderfully empty in August- everyone and their shrink goes on vacation- and you can find parking!
On Sat we went to neighbor Steve's 50th b-day party 2 houses down. Fun and no traffic. Then we were all hopped up on birthday cake so we stayed up to watch La Strada on TV. Anthony Quinn's voice is dubbed in Italian, but he's actually speaking English if you read his lips. Wierd.