Hot Weather

Today and yesterday were absolutely beautiful – sunny and cool. But it’s weird to experience that when the prediction is for brutally hot weather to settle in on Thursday and to last for at least a week. Temperatures and heat indexes are slated to go well above 100. We’ll be lucky to come out the other end with our vegetables and our newly planted trees still alive.

The Back Yard: A Timeline

January 2, 2012

February 10, 2012

March 10, 2012

April 10, 2012

May 10, 2012

June 10, 2012

An Early Summer Bike Ride

Took a bike ride down to the old covered bridge today. An overnight rain left the roads damp, and as the morning sun burned brighter, steam rose from the blacktop like smoke. My route led past small farms, some with soybeans sprouting in the fields, others with young corn, still only about a foot high. A mockingbird sang from a weathervane on top of a barn. I passed a farm where the owners grow hay, and they had already cut it and gathered it into the big, round bales that are too heavy for people to lift. They’re picturesque, but you have to move them with machinery.

Hay bales at a small farm near our house

Farther along, the road snaked through dark forest, damp and brooding after the rain, and then dropped down to follow the route of Stonelick Creek — the water’s a little low with the dry spring we’ve had. I passed the makeshift memorial to the teen girl who died last Christmas, her car sliding into a tree. This time I avoided looking at the teddy bears and reading the handwritten notes; they’re too heartbreaking.

Near the old covered bridge, a startled deer burst out of the underforest and ran across the road in front of me, terrified, before bounding away across a soybean field.

The return route took me up the Craver Road hill, as usual. The first time I tried to ride to the top of this hill without stopping, I felt like my heart was going to pop out of my chest. Now I make it without struggling, but it’s still a good workout. At the top, I spied a young girl standing in a field a few hundred feet from the road, staring intently at something on the ground.

In an hour’s ride, I saw perhaps half a dozen cars.

Canine TV

Ratings for the television reality show Washed! have plummeted like a stone. As you may recall, this was once local TV’s highest-rated reality show featuring humans taking showers, with the audience composed almost exclusively of dogs. However, viewers have apparently tired of the sameness of the episodes, day after day, and one recent poll revealed that they simply do not find the lead guy in the show, what’s his name, interesting to watch.

Meanwhile, the up-and-comer in canine viewership around here is another reality show, Dere’s Deers.

Violet and Ray watching an episode of “Dere’s Deers.”

The plot of Dere’s Deers is simple to the point that some might call it stupefying: Deer walk out of a forest onto the lawn of a country house, and eat grass and shrubbery. That’s about it. (Who writes this stuff?) However, the show has an interactive element: When members of the audience bark, the deer do things like go into alert posture, or turn and flee back into the forest, tails high.

It’s the interactivity, I think, that makes Dere’s Deers so popular.

Dog Names

It’s one of life’s mysteries – or just weird coincidence, perhaps – but we’ve never had a dog that has only one name. Take Violet, for example. In addition to her formal name, she also goes by Vi, Pie, P, Pilot, Missy, Missa PP and M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-pie.

And then there’s Ray. Ray is short for Raymundo, but more often he prefers to be called Ray Ray or Mr. Ray. And because he has a little stump of a tail, he’s sometimes even known as R-A-Y Stumpwaggin’ (those who recall a certain mediocre Midwestern rock band from the ’70s and ’80s might appreciate this name more than others).

It’s sometimes hard to keep up with all these different names for only two dogs, but we do our best.

Spring Weather

Last year we had the wettest March-April-May ever. This year it’s the warmest, boosted in particular by a heat wave in March that sent temperatures into the 80s at a time when there’s often snow on the ground.

Just more confirmation of how unpredictable this region’s weather is.