Elemental Origin, 6/14/2026
Whirring, 6/15/2026 (Named after the song Whirring by The Joy Formidable, it was in my brain playlist on repeat that day.)
(It's good thing I really like the song, I didn't need to force it out of my head with Deep Purple, Smoke on the Water. It's the ultimate cure for an unwelcome song ear worm.)
The Last Drop, 6/16/2026 (The Last Drop is another song by The Joy Formidable, only because I decided to play the rest of the album A Balloon Called Moaning to clear my brain's playlist.)
Yes...The Police album by that name is now 43 years old...I was in art school at the time, and they came to the Carrier Dome at SU. I didn't need to go to the concert, I heard it just fine in the studio. It was awesome.
No more songs...We had some pretty intense wind that evening, it seems there's been quite a few intense storms in the mid-west lately, we're only getting their dregs. There have been reports of some tornadoes spinning up here and there even in our area, which is concerning. While I was at my grand jury duty that day we had quite a storm roll through the city near the end of an ADA's presentation, we all paused and wondered as the building was being slashed by a roaring downpour. When we finished for the day and retrieved our phones everyone had messages about a tornado watch and then a warning...it looked like the whole state was experiencing it as the weather maps were red from the North Country all the way to the Southern Tier. Good grief. By the time my Fred picked me up, the storm was over and there was no damage to our property, except for a few sticks and loose leaves scattered around. We feel lucky.
I've said this many times over these first six months of the new year... it has been a very windy year so far.
It's been a very exhausting week, too much going on, my Fred and our son can talk about their days and I can't talk about some of my experiences other than pulling weeds, or digging sod for a new flower bed. I'm carrying a lot in my head from being on grand jury, and I have nowhere to put it except for the notebook that I keep at the courthouse, which will be destroyed after my term is done. It's been stressful. Very stressful. Thankfully, I can sleep at night...the minute I tip over, I'm out.
It's a chilly start this morning, 58 degrees, June 20th 2026. We had more storms pass through yesterday, very brief, but still very snotty. We might get into the low 70s today. It's going to be sunny, I'll take my time working on the garden.
A beautiful bumblebee passed away in my garden, I found her on the morning of 6/13 lying near the cranebill geraniums. I picked a few flowers and encircled her body with them. The bumblebees and honeybees do love these purple beauties.
The paintbrushes are in bloom, for a couple of years I've worked on getting them to grow in the little flower bed underneath the weeping cherry tree as they are growing in the grass nearby, so I've been collecting their seeds and sprinkling them around, and finally two sprouted in the garden this year! I have the yellow ones too in another part of the yard and the Wisdom Tree garden has them too. I always loved the orange ones best.
As always, my garden adventures include interactions with spiders. Usually, its the wolf spider mama's with their egg sacks running around frantically because I'm messing around near their hiding places...but on June 16th I discovered this very friendly jumping spider in my garden cart where I was dumping sod...I'm glad the critter made itself known or it might've gotten crushed when I dumped the sod off along the edge of the wild area out back. (It's quite the thicket back there, and very wet from all the rain).
This little guy was curious about me. (The eyes in the sunlight were shiny blue). When I was taking its picture I realized it might jump on me...sure enough, it made the leap. Naturally, I did girly scream, but the spider didn't get on me, it dangled on a thread attached to the cart. After some maneuvering with a stick and a weed, I eventually got it on the weed and carried it to a clump of daisies. It sat on a daisy for awhile, then, the next time I looked it was gone. It's always disconcerting when one doesn't know where a spider went
I have sunflowers sprouting in pots that I have caged with chicken wire to keep the squirrels and chippies from digging up the seeds. Now that they're getting bigger, I'm making individual chicken wire cages to protect them when I transplant them to the new flower beds I've made because the little shits will still "smell" them even at this stage and pull them out of the ground. They ignore all the repellents and noise makers (the little jerks). Every year its a battle to have sunflowers at all. Harper Lee has been catching the chipmunks and leaving me the half eaten carcasses as gifts...she's doing overtime this spring...so far she has killed three gray squirrel babies, which I felt bad about because they were very cute.
Tomorrow is the first day of summer...the season never seems long enough.
