Surfing in Our Backyard Wilderness

Olga just saw a fox trot past the back door, and now she's on red alert, peering out the glass. She's just waiting for me to let her out, but I'm trying to give the fox a chance to escape first. I don't doubt a fox would win in a showdown with ancient Olga but I'd rather not see it happen.

Yesterday was a lot of lazing around home. We had Dave's co-worker Lisa over for lunch, along with her new baby. It's been a long time since Olga has seen a small infant, so that was an interesting encounter to watch -- mostly just a sniff and then disinterest on Olga's part. "That thing has no treats!"

Dave made cold vichysoisse, chicken jardiniere (basically chicken with roasted vegetables, I think), and lemon posset for dessert. We served the dessert in our martini glasses, which have been sadly neglected of late, since I've basically sworn off martinis in deference to my periodically dodgy stomach.

Here was Olga during lunch, sunning herself right in the middle of the grass pathway that runs from the front portion of our lawn, through the teasels to the back. The teasels are quite jungly now and as you can see in the top photo, they're getting ready to bloom.

I polished off another issue of The New Yorker, this one containing a profile of a legendary surfer by William Finnegan, one of my favorite writers for the magazine. He wrote a book about his own surfing life a couple of years ago that I absolutely loved, even though I've never surfed myself and know very little about it. In this most recent article, I once again marveled at his ability to write using all the surfing lingo, in a way that left me, a non-surfing reader, feeling like I understood it:

Jock used to own Sunset. He surfed it twice this size with matchless style -- taking off behind the peak, back-dooring the tallest part of a huge wave, side-slipping in the barrel. Could he surf it now, in these conditions, on an 8'0"? I'm not sure. He obviously wasn't inspired to try. The beatings are fairly heavy, I can attest. I'm pleased to have survived.

I also worked on my latest Patricia Cornwell novel, "Unnatural Death," which I'm liking. It's a good summer read.

Speaking of foxes, here's the latest compilation of interesting footage from our Garden Cam. You'll see some flirtatious birds chasing each other, a few neighborhood cats (one with a blingy collar), an industriously digging squirrel, and a fox marking its territory on a flower pot. I put that pot overtop the spot where I buried the baby starling that Olga mortally wounded, to keep her and anyone else from digging it up. (Remind me never to use that flower pot indoors!)