Redhead at the water park.
I'm also wearing a t-shirt on my head.  It is not attractive!

Edited to rotate the picture. :P

Testing...

I am testing out this mobile blogging app.  Here is a picture of a young praying mantis on the largest tomato in my garden!

Dog Days

July has been pretty rough temperature-wise.  The past two or three weeks have seen triple digits as a matter of course.  Dan, the cats, the dog, and I have been relatively inactive.

We did hit a productive spurt last weekend, though, and accomplished a bunch of things around the house in anticipation of the kids' return after spending nine weeks with their dad.  I cleaned up Thea's and Faith's rooms, we put a vanity in Thea's room, we put new lamps in our bedroom, my friend Carrie and I installed the long-promised chair rail in Faith's room and are painting the trim tonight, Dan and I cleaned hundreds of pounds of plaster, insulation, wood and other debris from the unfinished room, he worked on putting up drywall, and he installed a new sink and vanity in the downstairs bathroom.  Lots to be proud of.

My yellow pear tomato plants are in mutant mode.  They are busting out of their cages, climbing out onto the grass, choking out the other tomato plants.  Their branches go down to the ground, ROOT THERE, and then grow back up again.  I have yellow tomatoes everywhere.  It's almost scary.  Carrie and I made yellow tomato salsa one evening and I thought it turned out quite good -- the tomatoes gave it a sweet taste that hid at first the kick from the peppers that burned your mouth.  Speaking of the peppers, after chopping up two jalepenos (one was from my garden!) and a serrano, my fingers burned for two days.  Also, removing my contacts that night apparently transferred the pepper oil onto my contacts, and when I tried to put them in the next morning, my eyeballs nearly burned out.  A quick Google search showed me I am not the first person to experience this.  I rinsed the contacts with hydrogen peroxide and then milk, and let them soak for several hours in fresh solution.  This seemed to do the trick.

My one and only jalepeno

I'm doing a little redesign of the photo album portion of my website.  I'm only.. oh, seven months behind in putting up pictures.  There are a couple of pages I did for 2012 already -- our May trip to Ocean City, and Thea's 8th grade graduation.

I must admit that I have kind of a music crush on Foster the People at this moment.  Which led me to this song that I am currently rocking out at my desk to -- check out the adorable Mark Foster along with Kimbra of "Somebody That I Used To Know" infamy and a DJ named A-Trak in a really cool collaboration on this song, "Warrior".  I love the video, too.

Enjoy and stay cool!

Stormy weather

So we got hit by that big storm that swept through the Midwest and then smacked DC/MD/VA.  I don't really have a terrible story -- we didn't lose power, nothing fell on our house or off of our house.  Lots of people have it really bad right now, but we don't.  We are very lucky and grateful!

So I'm really not complaining... but I was kind of sad about my tomatoes, our one casualty.  Here are my tomato plants on June 19.

They are almost as tall as me at this point.  Ten days later on June 29, they were way taller than me.  They were being barely contained by the tomato cages I had planted them in.  Then this "derecho" came through and flattened them.

All ten tomato cages blew over and left a tangle of twisted branches and wilting leaves.  So sad.  But we will rebuild!

We got some stakes and did our best to pull the cages back up and lash them to the stakes and to each other.  It's kind of a mess of wire, wood and twine, but it holds up the monstrous plants.  And, there was a silver lining:  Deep inside the hedge of tomatoes, I found two yellow pear tomatoes that had ripened!

I admired them for a while and then I ate them.  They were so good -- sweet and tangy.  There are literally well over a hundred more green pear tomatoes where those came from.  We're going to be popping them like candy!

In less tasty news, I cut the bejeezus out of my finger tonight.  Dan sharpened some of the knives in the knife drawer.  Imagine that!!  I am used to having dull knives.  So after I cursed a bit and bled all over, I sat down and held a paper towel tightly around my finger.... and then started to get light-headed and nauseous.  This is something that has come on in just the past 10 years or so.  I used to be able to donate blood at our office blood drives.  I didn't LIKE doing it, but I could, and it felt like such an important thing to do.  But sometime in between having Faith and having Holly, I got to the point where I could not donate blood without becoming faint and dizzy, having the Red Cross people get worried, and having to end the donation without finishing.  I was really disappointed in myself;  I felt like a huge baby.  And I couldn't really understand what the matter was!  I mean, I'm not queasy about blood, either my own or other people's.  It seemed like more of a physiological reaction.  Finally a nurse told me I was having a vasovagal response -- meaning that yes, it was a physiological response to stimuli and did not mean I was a giant wuss.  Basically a trigger causes a malfunction in the way the brain handles heart rate and blood pressure.  My blood pressure drops crazily.

Anyway, so I sat there with my bleeding finger, and got nauseous and dizzy, and had to go lay down on the couch and actually cried a little bit.  I felt pretty silly in a minute, when my senses came back, but HEY!!  I have a VASOVAGAL response!  I'm not just a big baby!