Hot summer nights

After much hand-wringing about when summer would arrive, it's here. Today the relative humidity already stands at 81% and it's predicted to reach 26°C later on. Saturday I even went to a cookout and it was pleasant enough to hang around outside.

Until the rain started.

It's raining again today. Of course. I have to say, seeing the lushness of the flora is a beautiful thing (even when some of that flora is roadside weeds). The neighbours have been cutting the grass multiple times a week just to keep up and I don't feel any compunction about trimming and pruning; the plants will spring back in no time.

The coolness has impressively extended the spring blooming season; we are only just now seeing the last of the irises. Of course, that means that the summer blooms are badly delayed. The first clematis blossom arrived only last week, a full two weeks or more later than usual, and the Asian lilies are still only in bud. Even the celandine poppies are only just getting started.

I'm regretting a bit--but only a bit--not planting anything in the garden. Salad greens would be doing magnificently well about now and I could use more in my diet. I've recovered enough from the frustrations of last year to dip my hand into landscaping again, moving a plant here and adding another there. The goldenrod and echninacea aren't loving the humidity, but the phlox is doing quite well, as is the knotweed. In fact, it might be having its best year so far.

Out enough

One of the consequences of this fog I'm living in is many small injuries. I seem to have lost my sharp sense of where my body ends judging by how often I misjudge distance and stub a toe or bang a shoulder. In particular, my fingers have been taking lots of punishment. It seems every other week that I slash one open doing the most innocuous of household tasks.

I still don't know what it was that I cut myself on Saturday night. Something in the cabinet under the sink. And judging by the mark, something jagged. I don't even remember being upset, just mentally shrugging, grabbing a piece of toilet tissue, and wondering how long I should hold it before I went upstairs to disinfect it.

I wasn't particularly rushing, but I was trying to pull the place together a bit in anticipation of a hookup. Needless to say at this point, he was a no-show. He'd originally proposed getting together the weekend before, at which time I'd assigned a 50% chance of it actually happening. Chagrinned, I decided afterwards that the actual chance was more like 5%. That night, though, I thought it was an actual 50% because we'd just made out at a party and he said he'd message me on his way to the bar. Nearly two hours later, I messaged him to say I was going to bed and said "raincheck?" I almost didn't reply but responded "if you're serious" and turned off my phone.

I did have several good interactions at cookout, though, including a geeked-out convo with another language nut. When he introduced us, I don't think that our mutual friend was prepared for us to spend the next hour ignoring him completely while we ran the gamut from Romance phonology to constructed scripts for isolating tonal languages. I think someone needs to introduce this boy to the larger online world of conlangery.

It wasn't a sure thing I'd even make it there. Friday night was one of my worst in weeks. I'm not sure if there was a specific trigger, but hearing from Fr Medlar a few days earlier sure did tap some emotions. I could easily have whiled away the day in bed reading, but I'd promised to help a neighbour move some plants so I keep watch over them in her absence so that got me to the porch. Getting from there to the cookout, however, took an equally great act of will.

I've told my neighbours that having them there is a damper on my going on. If getting in my socialising is as easy as opening the door, where's the incentive to gussy up and go further afield? It was a similar story when Monshu was home. I still want so badly to share my day with him and nothing has come close to filling that gap except in the very short run.