Summer Time is Cleaning Time

Now that I have had a few days off for summer, I have taken today to kind of catch my breath.  Mike has been busy with grass cutting - the summer job that never ends!  It seems that just as soon as he gets everything mowed, we get a dowsing of rain and the grass jumps up there for another mowing.  No complaints!  The rain is also watering his garden.

I have given the minimal help with the garden this summer.  During the late spring - perhaps during Memorial Day weekend - I gave him a little assistance as we set out twenty-plus tomato plants, a couple of cucumber plants, a couple of squash plants, and sewed some okra, squash, and cucumber seeds.  Early last week I spent a morning with him doing a bit of weeding and sewing a few more seeds.  He has added a few more tomatoes to the rows and has started a few more from seeds to be late harvesting.  Mike also added another row of okra to be his late crop of okra as well.

Only a couple of days later, he came in with a furrowed brow.  His tomatoes had some brown spots on the leaves.  He mentioned it to a friend who provided a phone diagnosis of blight and suggested a good spraying with a liquid copper solution.  So, immediately, I logged on and searched for symptoms of blight and remedies.  We crossed our fingers and hoped the kind of blight his tomatoes were suffering was one that could be controlled with a simple regular spraying of this copper solution and I ordered a couple of quarts of concentrated solution with speedy shipping.  The next morning Mike was up with the sun and out spraying in hopes of saving his veggies.  We are keeping our fingers crossed.

I have done a wee bit of spring/summer cleaning.  Some of our closet shelves have been ministered to by my attention.  I've weeded out some sweaters and tops in my work stash and bagged them up for donation.  I've scrubbed the bathrooms with vigor.  I've cleaned a few of the kitchen cabinets and keep working on a couple more each day.  I plan to take just a little corner and do a bit of cleaning each day between now and my return to school.  Hopefully, I can get around to all the corners to have things cleaned without breaking my old, aching back!

I've become a fan of Kroger's ClickList and ordered groceries online last night.  Mike rode with me first thing this morning to see how it all works and we picked up our order.  He thinks that might become a job he can handle - the  pickup - when I return to work in the fall.  We shall see...

This afternoon I have stirred up a batch of Basic Granola.  I have come to be a big fan of this stuff added to some yogurt and fruit.  I stumbled across the recipe a while back and just recently rediscovered it and gave it a try.  I told Bridgette this afternoon that I really look forward to retirement when I can cook up all the tasty looking things I've saved to Pinterest!  I'm to the point that I sometimes just chant the date that I am hoping becomes my retirement date!