We’ve started pulling the summer plants that are petering out: a row of paste tomatoes, the zucchini, yellow squash, most of the pattypans, old cucumber plants.  Woody hilled  up the leeks after thinning them.  I started the fall cole crops – Chinese cabbage, red cabbage, raddichio, bok choi.  The woodchuck ate all our brussels sprout plants in spring so we’ll have none this year. Last year the rabbits decimated them; this year a woodchuck. I’m waiting till the weather clears a bit to transplant the seedlings.  I thinned them and they were fed Wednesday. Today I intend to plant them all in my garden.

Wednesday, I saw my friend Karen Pasquale, who moved here a year and a half ago from Orleans.  Previously she spent her adult life in New Jersey.  One of her sons is still there but the other, Tony, has a restaurant Terra Luna in Truro and rents a cabin fairly near us.  We were friends with Tony, whom woody knows form WOMR, before Karen moved here, but I have become friends with her.  We sat on eh sunporch twelve feet apart and caught up.  She brought shortbread and a Portuguese sauce and I gave her a bag of beans –green, purple and yellow--– that woody picked that morning.  I’m done freezing beans as 29 lbs is more than I’ve ever frozen before, and the beans are still pumping them out.  I gave Dale some on Monday also.  I turned the little ones into a salad earlier this week and I also roasted the best whole beans.  Fortunately, have many ways to cook beans, but I also have hot, frying and stuffing peppers [I cooked the frying peppers  according to a Greek recipe with sausages on Thursday] and small but tasty eggplants coming in. I love eggplant dishes.

I could kiss the person who invented Greenies.  I tried every which way to give Schwartzie his antibiotic before we got some Greenies.  Now he asks for the pill in the morning and the evening, because he loves Greenies. It makes pilling a cat perfectly simple and easy as opposed to wrapping him in a towel and stuffing it down his throat – so that five minutes later he barfs it up.  Schwartzie has been very happy this week, now that his bladder isn’t full of sharp objects that hurt him and cause him to bleed. But Friday he had to go back to the vet to check him out and also to get his rabies shot, as did Mingus. Also their annual checkups.

Everybody in Massachusetts got rain last night but us.  The terrible drought continues.  It’s cooler, at least.  But no rain. 

 I was rooting for the Texans Thursday evening – Houston has had such a difficult time between Covid and storms.  But of course the Chiefs won.  I knew they would but hoped they wouldn’t. Not expecting much of the Pats this year as it will be a year of rebuilding.

 I’ve been working on a difficult poem.  I hope I can bring it off, but not yet have succeeded.