After the rains finally stopped and it was sunny and pleasant again, I proceeded into the garden with fervor and great ambition.  I wanted to get everything I had started inside out of the greenhouse.  With the days warming rapidly, the danger to the plants is that they might cook.  Also they were getting overgrown. Memorial day I got up @ 6:15, got out into the garden as fast as I could.  First I planted the remaining tomato plants that had needed to grow bigger when I put  the others in a couple of weeks ago.  I planted as many as I thought wise, then gave the others to our friend Dale.  Then I planted 96 most Genovese basil plants, including in the 96 a much smaller number of lemon basils.  Then I planted my remaining marigolds.  By now it was one thirty. I ate a quick peach and planted some perennials.  I forgot to say I was also doing the laundry, an unusually large one.  Then I froze spinach and finished the second half of the laundry.  At six, I sat down to eat, felt nauseous, got very dizzy and almost passed out. I was afraid I was having a stroke – what killed my mother and my brother.  Fortunately I had an appointment for an annual checkup with my doctor the next morning.  I was convinced I had high blood pressure.  Turns out because of dehydration  [it was hot in the sun] and exhaustion, I had very low blood pressure.  So I got a lecture on pacing myself, which I am doing my best to obey, and taking bottles of water into the garden while I work in the heat. Heat we certainly have now, heat and humidity.  Big rain Wednesday night with some thunder.  Every bush and tree is green.  Even the black locusts are leafing out. The irises are in bloom along with the ornamental garlic, purple, lavender and white globes the size of softballs.  The rhododendron forest is in full bloom  -- purple, lavender, white, red, pink.  Balls of color all over the plants, a number of the rhododendrons I planted decades ago are taller than me. Everything is now out of the greenhouse and I planted nasturtium seeds and acidanthera bulbs before I went to the dentist.  Then I froze more spinach and started another workshop portfolio.  For supper I made whole wheat pasta with chicken sausage meatballs and my own canned Italian-type sauce and paste tomatoes.  Woody is staking the paste tomatoes today.  I wrote two poems yesterday, haibuns.  I don’t like many fixed forms but haibuns are one I enjoy.  I like the contrast between the prose element and the poetry, the haiku at the end. Friday night we had our anniversary dinner at Moby Dick’s.  It’s an informal restaurant just across the marsh from us, but you can’t see our house because our dense woods is in the way.  They have perfectly cooked, environmentally sound seafood. We had steamers and boiled lobsters.  They play good vintage jazz not too loud and it is open to the air.  Because they know when our anniversary is, they gave us dessert to take home [we were too stuffed to eat it there].  Hot fudge on coffee icecream. We split it.  We bring a bottle of chilled champagne every year.  Cae home full and a little high. Mr. Black and White is hanging around outside again leaving little presents of dead mice at the door.  We don’t know if the gifts are intended to impress us or Xena.  Puck and Mingus are furious.  They know he wants  to get inside and eat their treats and steal their woman.  Xena pays not attention to him except once or twice to hiss at him, but he is determined.    He is far from homeless, belongs to someone who comes out weekends and summers to a house not far from us, is well fed and glossy coated.  I hate people who don’t fix their cats. Woody is staking the tomato plants I started and planted.  He  has finished with the six kinds of paste tomatoes and is working on the tend kinds of maincrop tomatoes.  the only early type I start is determinate, which means it doesn’t need to be staked.  I am weeding, weeding, weeding.  I froze rhubarb last night.  I’ll make a compote of some I didn’t freeze maybe this afternoon. Today it is hot, it is bloody hot.  I worked outside till eleven and then it was too much for me.  Yesterday was even hotter. The cats collapsed at full length and looked half dead.  However as it cooled in the evening, Puck found a mouse downstairs, Xena killed it and brought me half as a gift.  See, Mr.Black and White isn’t the only predator around here, they say.