Thanks to Carl, the pool is magnificent. Clear. Tadpoles happily swimming. One worry about the pool: I heard tell of someone who got a flesh-eating bacteria that landed her in the hospital. How did she get it? Rumor has it by swimming in a lake with an open wound.

Our asparagus has bugs, even though Carl and Doug fire-blasted them a few weeks ago. I weeded the patch in early June and plunked in a few strawberries, some spinach seeds. We will see if they will win out over the weeds! Meantime, an herbalist friend of ours came by to see what we’ve got growing.

Their house got moved and we feared that our Kestrels had moved elsewhere. But when the Harris Center folks arrived, low and behold! Five babies.

Snowball had an eye infection and there are a lot of chickens in need of a bath out there. The turkeys I see with my very own eyes, flirting and dancing and buffing up their wings. But for all those others tweeting and fluttering? Here is a list of birds that I hear in the mornings when I go out to jump into the pool.

Carl and our friend Doug rebuilt the fence around the kitchen garden. With the help of our two garden assistants, we planted out myriad seedlings in the vegetable garden this week. Happy are the seedlings who escaped the cats gnawing and chewing!

We visited a buffalo farm in Stoddard, NH a couple of weeks ago. We also visited friends in Rhode Island, and visited the farm they live near.

Speaking of writer’s block, it doesn’t exist! I read Sarah Rhul’s essay “Writer’s Block” and apparently it’s not real. As she said, it’s more like “the studious avoidance of writing.” She compares it to “exercise block,” which I have also developed. She gives a number of reasons for avoidance, all of which gave me pause.

Bujo. It sounds like a kind of jewel. Give it a Romance language accent, it’s rather elegant, mysterious. In fact, it stands for “bullet journal.” It began March 13th, an obsessive search to replace my datebook, which hadn’t been Golidlocks-just-right anyway.

As I reached into the oven to check on the phyllo dish that was baking, I heard a noise and looked over to the door where…a baby bear was sniffing!

I’m preparing for a flute recital in September. Here is a beautiful piece that I hope to learn some day, but it won’t be for a day in September.

A dead hen. A tree fallen on the driveway. Cats with diarrhea. I thought I had it together. Carl had made it alive up to Saddleback skiing in Maine, but the snow storm here had turned to rain and left the trees all around Darwin’s View—and the solar panels—covered with ice. As the sun rose, everything around me twinkled.

A few days ago, on a Saturday morning in the midst of a storm, I went out to tidy the chicken coop. I noted that Rosie was not well. She huddled, hardly lifted her head, and her wings were drooped.

My begonia, that I got from my mother’s mother or was it my mother’s cousin? In any case, it is quite suddenly ill. To the point that I think she won’t survive…

It has been pointed out to me that I spend more on my email provider than I need to. That it would be easy to switch to a different provider and way more cost effective. Thus, last week, I debated whether to switch. I mention this because it was during my debate about what company to switch to that I remembered the reason I originally went with GreenGeeks.

We went to Firelight Theater’s reading of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s play Aria da Capo. She wrote it in 1919 and one of the most impressive aspects of Aria da Capo? It is timeless. Written over a century ago, yet it is entirely applicable to our current reality.

Last week was on the windy side here at Darwin’s View, with 35 mph winds buffeting the house on a fairly consistent basis. Our large garbage can kept flinging itself out from its position against the tool shed. Having broken free, it would skid down the driveway as if it were late for an appointment.

I mentioned my detour to Pet Finder in a recent post, a detour that took me to possible pet bunnies. Lo and behold the next day, as he was hopping into the shower, Carl mentioned that Tinkerbell’s friend was back.

I went to the coop for a photo shoot. I haven't been spending enough time with the hens and they let me know it. Squawking, pecking and staring at me mournfully, as if to say, “We thought you had forgotten us.”