Summer Adventures

 This has to be have been one of the most gorgeous weekends of the entire year! We hit NEBCO again on Friday afternoon, and split a really delicious pizza from one of the trucks. Saturday morning we did part of the Branford trail again. Like last time, we dropped my car at the Tabor lot, and then started from the Jarvis Creek Farm portion of the trail, right along the water. The marshland had grown in beautifully since we were last there in spring, and almost all of the osprey platforms had denizens. The weir was very calm this time, so I wasn't freaked out walking over it. Just 1.5 miles brings you out into Stony Creek, which is like a mini-Cape Cod, where we had breakfast at the cafe. The service isn't quick, but that is honestly the best bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich I think I've ever had. It's always nice to see all of the locals greeting each other by name, too.

From there it's another three miles back to Tabor. I had suggested wearing pants, mostly just thinking about ticks, but it turned out to be very important because of the amount of undergrowth and poison ivy capable of touching you even on the trails! 

This time I took a picture of the rock crevice where there are helpfully ropes to help you climb it. I'm still flabbergasted that this is a town trail, right behind the fancy golf course, and yet there is no walk-around if you don't feel like doing a scramble. Sean insisted this time that it's totally doable without the ropes, and yes, probably, but it's steeper than the photo makes it look, especially at the top, and slipping would be a very nasty fall. I don't think I could do this trail in reverse and go down that slope...too afraid of heights. 

Sunday morning we had coffee in town with my friend Denise and her partner Bob, who were passing through on their way back from a vacation in Maine. It's always such a pleasure to see her! It is crazy to think that we met in Rome in 2014, she was married to Francesco, and her kids were teens. Now Gabriel is finishing up his PhD in Physics and hoping to work for a national lab or NASA, while Gregory (once a "Stalinist" Communist, whose facility with languages was so great he shocked Chinese people during a study-abroad in Chengdu) is finishing up a stint with the Peace Corps in West Africa and dating an anthropology/archeology grad student at Tulane. LIFE!

Then Sunday afternoon it was time for the rubes! Charles has gotten into cooking, so yesterday he cooked with his "sous chef" Uncle Sean! They made Armenian-style beef kabobs. Leon tried a stuffed grape leaf and acted like it was the worst thing he'd ever tasted.

I broke out a Lego set, purchased from Costco for just such an occasion. My role was simply to count out pieces and turn pages in the booklet. Unfortunately, not far into the process, something went wrong, and I frankly couldn't figure it out, so Charles came to help out -- which required starting from scratch. Cue Leon lying face-down on the living room carpet in protest. In the end I bagged it up as far as they'd gotten and Jen suggested keeping it to be continued at a future date. 

Finally, this picture: this shows my neighbor Joe watching his tractor be winched out of the creek next to his house on Saturday. We'd just come home from hiking and I was getting my lawn chair set up, vaguely aware of him cutting his front lawn, when all of a sudden the mower cuts out and I hear him yell. I look over, and there is no tractor and no Joe! I ran (limped, thank you gimpy right ankle) over there, and there's Joe sprawled on the embankment, thankfully mostly unharmed, with the tractor having stopped at the retaining wall vs. gone all the way down into the stream. He refused to attend to his bleeding foot at the time, insisting it was nothing, but later texted me that he had to get 16 stitches in his heel. This man had open heart surgery last year...

Summer Garden

Starting with the good news: Gojira-chan lives! The less-good news: the deer (I assume) have resumed nibbling the lilies, and they've also started snacking on the hostas, both their flowers and leaves. This is the first year of the nearly 6 we've been here that the hostas have had damaged, despite being described as "deer candy." I wonder what changed -- is it just that they got more comfortable coming closer to the house? They also nipped some of my coneflowers and a relatively-new black-eyed Susan. I'm a little loathe to keep investing in the disgusting-smelling deer repellent...am I going to douse all my plants forever?

Saturday afternoon, I was sitting by pond when Sean came back from a trot around the neighborhood, so he joined me. He was explaining how he's started to meet some of our further-out neighbors on his walks, including an old lady named Gwen who has lived here for decades and knew our house as the "Bolivar place" (the Bolivars being the first owners, 1961 through when Betty sold it in 2018) because she used to babysit. Among other tidbits, she told him that Don, the husband, had two very mean German shepherds (perhaps explaining why geese may not have been a concern for them...), and that she remembered helping our neighbor Joe's father-in-law when he fell into the creek beside his house, with him begging her not to tell his wife. She also told him that she is no longer on speaking terms with her own neighbor Justine, aka crazy goose lady, someone who feeds all wildlife (and once complained about the price of peanuts, which she feeds to squirrels!) and who once would have tried to dump an extra gosling in our pond, only it was not the same age as the ones there that year. Apparently Justine disapproves of our use of fencing to discourage the geese. Relations with Gwen broke down when she discovered Justine had come across the street to put up a "goose crossing" sign and water dish on Gwen's property, lol. 

While we're sitting there we start to notice a bird we don't recognize -- in fact, two of the same species, chasing each other. Then one of them starts fishing, with these very audible plops into the water, and we can't see if it got anything. It wasn't vocalizing, so I couldn't use the Merlin app on it, but following the "step by step" ID we discovered it was a belted kingfisher, which was marked "uncommon" for our area. Apparently they have a specific fishing technique where they dive headfirst and swallow the prey as they go down, so unlike the herons, we didn't see it emerge with anything. As Sean noted, our excitement over this discovery really showed that we are over 40, haha.

I was also by the pond for a bit on Sunday (when I saw Gojira-chan), and I swear I saw something in the reeds, on the far side, push the reeds aside with like a limb. Could a heron do that? I'm not sure. But I have to imagine that anything with a paw, like a raccoon, would make the reed mat move, at least a little. I needed binoculars!

One of my tasks this weekend was to remove the plastic, rip out the regrown weeds, and restart the solarizing. It was weird; the top third of the patch had successfully crumbled into dead dust, but the bottom 2/3 were thriving under the plastic. I also suited up in full Tyvek, two successive days, to battle invasive plants in areas that also contain the native-but-awful poison ivy. From the milkweed bed, I pulled as much creeping charlie as I could, as well as cutting any wineberry and multiflora rose. It was here, a few weeks ago, that I had used a plant identifier on a trailing vine-type plant and discovered it was an invasive called black swallow-wort. Bummer, I thought, I'll pull that later. Welllll then I discovered that the slope up to the road from the back of what we call the "alley" was absolutely covered in them. At first I thought it was Japanese knotweed (which can be found on the road nearby, so I'm sure it's just a matter of time), so it's not that bad, but it's bad. Terribly invasive, hard to remove or control without chemicals (and this is close to the back of the pond, so that's not a great solution), and is allopathic, meaning it changes the soil so other things can't grow. 

The bee balm is doing swimmingly, as well as the one hyssop that flowered there. We got our annual visit by a lone monarch butterfly yesterday and I wanted to say...tell your friends!!

My second round of Tyvek-warriorness was early Sunday morning, wading in to what we call "no man's land" between us and our neighbors. My primary focus was to remove the Chinese wisteria that tries to climb and eventually strangle all of the trees, though I also found an oriental bittersweet climbing my lilac. Later on I went back with my plant ID app and looked at the many seedling trees, mostly growing on the half that borders our Vietnamese neighbors - a bunch of black cherry trees, some Japanese cherry, a Japanese maple (but its leaves are green, not red like ours, so it was be a subspecies), a shagbark hickory that I need to go back and rescue from a climbing vine, a red oak, a lilac (!!), and a tiny silk tree, which I will have to pull, even though I like them. Oh, and a fuck-ton of rose of Sharon, even though ours don't even bloom. 

All in all, it was a very productive weekend, and the weather couldn't have been more beautiful! It absolutely didn't feel like mid-July, though the heat is coming back. I just planted a third trio of two orange mums and one anisse hyssop closer to our house in the center garden, so looking forward to seeing how those get established!

San Diego

 

A belated recap of our weeklong trip to San Diego to visit Ron and Kathy! We had a wonderful time, though I confess to being a little nervous about it beforehand. There's a big generational gap between us and them, and the most time I've spent with them are long, wine-soaked dinners at their house in Fairfield (Sean, of course, is more intimately acquainted with Ron from their 2019 camino journey). They were really wonderful hosts, and had thoughtfully planned an itinerary that included downtown in the afternoon (I am a talker, but Kathy is a talker, so this silent time was very much necessary).

                                               

Kathy and Ron properly live in La Jolla, a fancy subdivision of San Diego. I was surprised to learn that San Diego is full of very steep hills and canyons -- their house is on "La Jolla Mesa," and the neighbors on the opposite side of the street have views of the Pacific (with the corresponding property values). Their house has no views, but as soon as you're on the main street, there's an incredible view onto the coastline below. Down by the water, there are many hundreds of sea lions, as well as many thousands of pelicans. I was delighted by them at first (very Jurassic Park looking!) but oh my god, the smell was intense and unrelenting.

Seeing the Pacific, with clear skies to the horizon, was really something. (Technically I've seen it in San Francisco as a kid, but with the fog you couldn't see much!) Sean said it was like looking at the edge of the world. The power of the waves coming in was also a reminder that, although we live on a body of water, Long Island Sound is still a sound at the end of the day, mostly placid! And even our East Coast beaches don't really compare to what you're seeing out there. Truly majestic.

 

Here we're at the Maritime Museum, a flotilla of linked ships from Age of Exploration caravels to merchant steamers to the USS Dolphin, the last diesel sub. That's where we're standing above left. Very cool to have gone into a sub, but so claustrophobic, damn those poor sailors. At right, Sean and Ron are looking their piratical best. Unfortunately, Kathy suffers from intense motion sickness, so she noped out at the very first ship (which included a guide who demonstrated the utility of sea shanties for timing pulls on the ropes!)

Here we're at the Salk Institute, after our tour of Louis Kahn's iconic building overlooking the Pacific, as hang-gliders sailed past in picturesque fashion. My hair is flat as hell because I had been forced to borrow a sun hat from Kathy. I was not prepared for the strength of the sun at a lower latitude! It was our good fortune that this was our only cloudy day, because we were outside on this tour for 90 minutes in full exposure. 

Note: the concrete walls of the building were insanely smooth to the touch; the guide (a former New Haven surgeon, retired to SD) explained that Kahn had the architects shake the concrete forms to remove air pockets much more than would be typically done for this kind of work.

This was taken at their "local" Italian spot in La Jolla. I gained a better understanding of what "generational wealth" means when Kathy explained that her mother and uncle purchased the commercial block on which this restaurant sits in the 1960s as part of a real-estate 1031 exchange after selling farmland further north. Her siblings share it now, while Kathy got the house (and with Prop 19, her mom's level of taxation). Her dad also worked in the defense industry. It helps to have $$$ and to hold onto land!

On our way home, tired but happily not sunburned. We flew Breeze out of Bradley, and had first class seats on the way there, which was fantastic. Sadly, those seats had already been booked for the return leg when I bought our tickets in April, so it was back to simply "extra leg room" seats, sigh. 

Kathy and Ron encouraged us to come again, but as much as it was lovely to spend time with them, and the weather was phenomenal...I did not "fall in love" with San Diego. I missed the lushness and green of the East Coast immediately! I've never loved desert landscapes, scrub brush, canyons...not my scene. Give me a good oak tree any day!