July 18, 2010

One word for this week - HOT.  Well, I should also add HUMID - so two words for the week.  Along with the rest of the country we enjoyed another week of very hot and humid weather.  This has made our nightly runs an adventure in sweating and is making it hard to get in the long mileage runs that will get us ready for the half-marathon later this year.  This heat spell has also been accompanied by a lack of rain in CT which is not doing great things for our garden.  Although we did manage to harvest some crops this week and as I promised earlier in this blog, the pictures for the week are of our harvest.  The wild raspberries came in this week and we enjoyed a bumper crop - must be the hotter weather.  We picked over 8 cups of them and could have picked more, but felt that was enough for one year and we were tired of getting scratched from the thorns.  Now if we could only get the raspberries in the garden to grow so well.  Jo cranked up her jam making skills again and quickly produced several jars of raspberry jam to accompany our strawberry from earlier this year. 

We also picked our first crop of beans and will be enjoying fresh beans now for about a month.  We had to freeze several bags since there were way too many for us to consume in a week.  Our garden also produced for the first time a cucumber - drum roll here please.  We have planted cucumbers for several years, but have never actually had them grow until this year.  So another check in the plus column for this year's garden.  Lastly, the cherry tomatoes are starting to redden up and we should be able to enjoy eating them for the next several weeks.  So, a good week for the garden although if we don't see some rain soon, future pickings might be limited.

For the rest of the weekend, we enjoyed a couple of rental movies - Up in the Air was particularly noteworthy - and had a great fish dinner along with a Peach Mable (you'll have to ask Sheri for the recipe - just click on the blog to the right) at Sheri and Bruno's last night (compliments to Sheri's culinary skills) before heading to the Granite Theater for a show.  The show was a high energy comedy called "The Perfect Wedding" and was very well performed.  The rest of the weekend chores consisted of working with the above mentioned vegetables/fruits (freezing or canning), cutting the grass, pulling some more weeds, and continuing progress on cleaning the windows.  Still have 24 to go - although we have completed 40.  Told you this house has a lot of windows.

Nothing big to report from work this week.  Jo was in New York during the week with a run over the Queensboro bridge one of the days she was there.