Sun and Rain, This and That

We're having a midsummer chilly spell. It rained all day yesterday and the temperatures were in the high 50's. Thank goodness Olga's dog-walker showed up -- even though he wasn't technically scheduled -- so I could spend the day pretty much on the couch. It was fabulous.

(I'm posting this sunny photo of a nearby pub, taken several weeks ago, as an antidote to the chill.)

I did get some productive stuff done in the morning. I managed all the refuse for our household and those of our neighbors, as I wrote yesterday -- and the rubbish men did pick it all up, thank goodness. You just never know with those guys. Sometimes they leave things behind and sometimes they come through.

I also worked on bagging up some yard waste that we've been piling up at the back of the garden. We don't want a super-manicured garden -- we want to leave some places for bugs and critters to live. But that pile of old cuttings, twigs and branches was getting out of hand. It will be collected next week by the yard waste recycling people.

The downside of working in the yard, for me, is that I always get attacked by nasty little gnat-like insects that leave red, itchy welts on my skin. They never seem to bite Dave -- or if they do, they don't leave marks -- but they feast on me. It only happens when I thrash around in leaves, weeding or, in this case, bagging up brush. My arms are a red lumpy mess.

I've been meaning to post this photo of some hollyhocks growing on a street where I regularly walk Olga. Aren't they impressive? As tall as I am! They came up like this last year, too.

Finally, Dave and I watched several movies -- "The Imitation Game" and "The Theory of Everything" (it was "British scientist biopic" night, apparently) as well as the original "La Cage Aux Folles," which Dave had never seen. He loves "The Birdcage," so I wanted him to see the original European movie on which it was based -- and even I never realized how closely the two are linked. The dialogue is almost line-for-line. "The Birdcage" always rankled me -- the idea that a young man in 1996 would ask his gay parents to upend their lives and hide their relationship from his fiancée's family annoys me to death. But the original was made in the 1970s, and back then, that plot seems more defensible.

I finally got a decent shot of the woodpecker that comes to our yard. We replaced the bird seed in our feeder with dried mealworms, because the seed was attracting so many huge, flapping pigeons that the other birds weren't coming around. Apparently pigeons don't like mealworms. But woodpeckers do!