Today is Mom's 93rd birthday!!! And while Brian and I are sorry not to be able to join the celebration, we know she'll have a lovely party surrounded by her grandchildren and great-grandchildren at my sister and brother-in-law's house tonight. I am delighted to report she continues to do well, is very consistant with her rehab exercises, and all in all is still the role model I aspire to emulate. Happy happy, Mom, we all love you!
And it's also two years this month that Sadie returned to us from her less than happy adoption attempt. She has become such a fixture in my life, I can't imagine this house without her. And while we're on the Sadie Subject, she took her first (and probably last) overnight road trip with us this month. Brian's old friend Harvey was kind enough to invite all three of us to stay with him at his beachfront home in Connecticut.
While I loved walking along the ocean, and became rather obsessed with collecting the "golden" shells Harvey distracts his grandchildren with,Sadie apparently had some concerns that she was going to be left behind. She would not let me out of her sight, and if I moved from one chair to another, she did too. And the night we stayed over, there was a terrific series of thunderstorms that shook the rafters and had me dressing and undressing Sadie in her thundershirt all night long.
The thundershirt does work, at least to the extent that while she still occasionally shakes, I no longer have to spend the entire storm time down on the floor with her wrapped in my arms, covered with drool and wondering how much longer my back can hold out! It's a huge improvement; any of you dog folks that want more information, just let me know. And to make the whole experiment even sweeter, the thundershirt was a gift from Sadie's doting uncles. It does take the entire ABR village to raise this girl!
And now, for the garden news. This has been a really strange year, for the first time EVER the deer have actually eaten the bergamot in the lower terraces, put there almost eight years ago and unmunched till now as something deer just wouldn't eat.
And even stranger, they haven't eaten the water lillies (yet!) which usually don't even get to show much bloom before they are gone.This year almost half the pond was taken over by some tall lillies, which I thought were completely eaten up last year, when I found what was left of them floating forlornly on the surface. I took a stick and poked back what I could into the pond muck - and voila!
And to wrap it all up, the vegetable crop this year includes eighteen inch cucumbers (we had NONE last year), more tomatoes than we can eat, both fried green and bright red, and the best chili crop I've ever grown! The zucchini was a complete bust for the third year in a row, so I am really done with that. The basil crop was good, not quite as much as last year, and our two remaining eggplant plants are trying hard to carry on, their third sibling having already been eaten by unknown bugs right down to the ground. Neither beer in trays, nor pennies, seem to deter them much. And outside the garden cage, in our compost heap, we currently have three or four volunteer tomato plants (again, not eaten by deer, which really confuses me) and the beginnings of some tiny potatoes. As we careen into the Labor Day weekend, we send you all our love and hope everyone has a happy and peaceful time. We will be content here munching our vegetables, petting our dog, and eating up the latest of our dear friend Janet's delightful pound cake presents. Nice!!!
