I’m almost done replanting the rest of the flower boxes on the porch.
A meander down 6A from Dennis to Peter’s house included a productive stop at the County Farm, where I picked up two nice, bushy (you should forgive the phrase) impatiens. A couple of six packs of fall pansies should finish off the job.
I spent some quality time in the garden yesterday and, as usual, less is more: pruned out a full cartload of dead stems, branches and leaves. Surprisingly, there was a fair amount of healthy new growth under all that junk.
Grandson Bob did a Saturday night sleepover, and his sharp eyes spotted a cricket in the LIVING ROOM. I was able to smash the loathesome creature, and bought some new sticky traps for the basement on Sunday; they work: some insect with a hard carapace and long legs got caught last night.
Bob was running a fever all day yesterday, so we had a boring visit since he couldn’t really go out and play. He’s had a tough summer, has been fighting a sinus infection for the last two months.
Friday, I spent the day in Cambridge on a mission for the office, and realized afterwards how much I miss the city. After spending a day with bright, professional people, the contrast with Mashpee provincialism was extreme. Maybe it’s less so in Woods Hole; one wonders: where, as a non-resident, can one make contact with the community there?
A house on Peter’s street is on the market for $549,900. It’s a brand new monster house right on the pond, and I suspect, even with its relatively small lot, it would be selling for $100-200,000 more in a different town. Still, not a bad lifestyle: Santuit Pond is quite beautiful, and it’s part of a protected area.
Although it was on the market for less than 3 weeks, the house next door to Peter’s that listed for $329.9 with only one working bathroom is already under agreement.
The dog days have us in their grip again; this morning, I dumped a full container from the dehumidifier, almost 3 gallons. It was 86 in Cambridge last Friday, and I’ve had the A/C on here pretty much continuously since Saturday afternoon.
So, the Olympics is over, and the RNC is here. One admires the mettle of the 100,000 or so protesters who ignored the heat and humidity and gathered in NYC yesterday.
Following the Dukakis/Mondale/Carter playbook, the Kerry/Edwards campaign continues to lose ground. The mainstream press gleefully announced that Bush already has won the Electoral College, which evidently only includes multi-millionaires with a stake in the pharmaceutical and oil industries, otherwise how can one rationally explain this?
On Saturday, Carolyn gave me a copy of a splendid article by Bob Lifton on the generational connection between the VietNam and Iraq wars. It sounds like she’s “set” for cleaning staff next weekend, so Saturday was probably my last chambermaid gig at the resort.
I enjoyed it, cleaning the old-style woodwork and “setting up” the romantic sea green and ocean blue linens.
All part of a summer that even with the turmoil at work and the neighborhood, was like the lovely song, “Beautiful Candy”, a season in which, from time to time, one could stop living for reason and really start living for rhyme.