The heat wave has broken

I'm loving the cooler weather we're having right now. Garden time is much more enjoyable. We've been getting lots of kale, chard, zucchini, beans, and cabbage (also green beans and zucchini from our giving garden for St. Susan's kitchen). The flower gardens have really filled in, and though I thought I was finished with planting for this year, I couldn't resist getting some "Cherry Brandy" coneflowers and Russian sage to add to the landscape. I love my flowers.


We've been finding lots of things to fill up our time lately, which hasn't left a lot of time for sitting still and writing about it.  Tom and I tend to be very project-oriented workaholics.  I may not be employed, but I do work, between my projects here at home, the church, and the food buying club.  We don't get out enough to really appreciate why we chose to live here in the first place.  But lately, we've been working on it.

 On Saturday, we decided to head across the lake to Bemus Point for an alfresco lunch at the Italian Fisherman.  I love that it is right on the water--I spent a lot of time on lakes when I was growing up and have a special fondness for that environment.  Bemus was bustling. It's definitely where the action is around here for families on vacation with the kids.  Swimming at the beach was declared off limits last week because of the blue green

algae blooms, but there are still plenty of places to play, shop, and eat, and I guess that's what people were doing! Pedestrians all over the place.


The previous weekend, there was the St. James Italian Festival, which has a good chance of becoming an annual must-do event for us. The food was great, especially the cannoli!

I'm also making more time for garage saling (very dear to my reusing-recycling-repurposing heart!) and visiting the Downtown Jamestown Farmers Market on Fridays. 

And in the evenings, I read.  The books and authors I have been choosing lately have taken me on foreign adventures-- to Ireland, Iran, Afghanistan, Spain. Places I will never see with my own eyes (and in a couple of cases, thank goodness), but the written word has the power to transport us across time and space. Without using fossil fuels!

This weekend, we'll go out some more. The Jammers are playing at home, the long-awaited Brazil Craft Beer and Wine Lounge will be open on Friday and Saturday to preview some of their selections, there's a craft fair in Westfield, and our church is having its summer picnic.   The weather looks good, maybe a little rain on Saturday. But if it makes the plants happy, who am I to complain?

Happy days

Now that summer has finally gotten here, it's flying by.

Our grandkids (and their parents) were here for the 4th of July weekend. (Oh, how we wish they lived close enough to drop over for an afternoon anytime and we could see them more frequently than for three days a couple of times a year.)

The weather sort of cooperated. It was threatening to rain most of the time, but held off when we needed it to -- for grilling and eating dinner on the patio and fireworks, for instance. They had been so impressed by Jamestown's Labor Day fireworks display two years ago, that they were expecting big things.  Jamestown doesn't do fireworks for the 4th of July, but most of the lakeside communities do, and there is the tradition of "lighting the lake" with a ring of flares along the shoreline. So we decided to see it all from the vantage point of the rest stop off I-86, with its million dollar view overlooking the lake. It's a popular spot, and the atmosphere was festive with people staking out their spots with blankets and lawn chairs on the hillsides, while kids adorned with glow sticks ran off their end-of-the-day energy. Logan watched them for awhile, and then decided he wanted to lie down and roll down the hill. The whole thing wasn't as impressive as the "right there" effect of fireworks in Baker Park, but it sufficed.

Since he was asleep before we got back home, he missed seeing the large deer standing in our neighbor's yard (on her way up the street to eat my lilies, no doubt)--and he very much wanted to see "animals" while he was here! Well, he got his wish when the whole family took a walk around the neighborhood at 6 am (having young children means you wake up early) and saw the whole herd on their way back into the woods after a night of gourmet dining in residential gardens. 

The play tent and bean bag game we had picked up at a garage sale last year were big hits, and so was the Fisher Price dollhouse (another garage sale find, intended for the church nursery, but I hadn't taken it there yet).  Grandpa also introduced Logan to the gyroscope, the plasma globe, and the card game of War. We apparently passed the entertainment test.   And of course we topped it off with a visit to Peterson's Candies, because grandparents must do what parents frown upon!

Now that the highlight of our summer has come and gone, we're back to the more mundane (but still enjoyable) things like tending the garden. We've been getting a steady supply of snow peas and chard and black raspberries, the kale is just about ready, the zucchini and green beans are coming soon, and I harvested my first beautiful big head of cabbage yesterday. All the rain we've been getting is making the garden very happy, and thank goodness for the superior drainage you get with raised beds.

The college community gardens are also looking wonderful, but the deer damage is apparent in some of the beds (thank goodness I covered mine with the bird netting to discourage them) and the fence has still not been installed.

We heard some very good community news yesterday: Cummins and Wegman's are going solar! Solar Liberty was recently awarded 6.5 Megawatts of Solar Power Projects from NYSERDA. Cummins Jamestown Engine Plant - JEP (2MW, Roof Mount System), Wegmans (536.31kW, Roof Mount System) and two additional 2MW customers will partner with Solar Liberty on these solar installation projects.We hope many more will follow the leadership of these forward-thinking businesses. BPU, are you listening?