Folks – it’s November 6. In Central NJ. This is NOT the tropics. Yet my tropical flowers – canna lilies and hibiscus – are in bloom. Gorgeous blooms.
I discovered that I have a volunteer tomato plant. There are TWO huge tomatoes on the plant, and 2 smaller ones near the bottom. Either these came from my mulch that I put on the plants in the garden back in May or they came from seeds dropped by birds.
I mentioned previously that the dahlias and cosmos are in glorious bloom, and the Mexican Sunflower is doing its part as well (orange flowers on the left).
The snap dragons figured if everyone else was blooming, they wanted to join the party.
And of course the grape tomatoes needed to prove that they were as capable as everyone else of flowering and fruiting even though we have had several nights down in the 40s.
Yep, I am enjoying it all immensely. But I’m a little afraid that we’re going to pay for this weather in January/February.
Cool enough for a fire and no fan. All the little lights hanging in the ivy walls
The weekend temperatures fluctuated as greatly as our plans. Our maybe that’s backwards – maybe our plans fluctuated as greatly as the weather. In either case things changed quickly. We started the weekend with no plans. I thought I’d keep working on weeding and chores. My brother-in-law suggested that the 4 of us “do something”, maybe a bbq. I said great. Then I remembered we’d talked about taking the Circle Line cruise around NYC. A perfect weekend to do that! Friday night around dinner time I booked us 4 tickets for Sunday. Saturday morning my sister emailed me to say that my brother-in-law had test positive for Covid that morning. Sigh. Because she mentioned getting someone to use their tickets, I never checked for a refund.
getting ready
I thought it would be fun to have our friends Pam and Jerry go out with us. They like “doing things” and they were a week-recovered from covid. As they do not answer their phone or email on Shabbos, it’s not always easy to reach them. I drove over to their house and checked with Pam. They couldn’t go Sunday but they were available that night. Yes! Come for drinks & snacks on the deck. I kept trying to find someone to use the other 2 tickets. My friend Amy could use 1 but her son Joe didn’t want to sail. It finally occurred to me that maybe I could get a refund or reschedule. Yes, indeed both of those are possibilities. So while texting Amy I handled the refund request. I invited Amy & Joe for dinner on the deck on Sunday. 🙂
The flowers started doing better once we had a day of rain and reduced temperatures.
Well, Saturday night was clear and COLD. Cold is, of course, a relative term. Given the 90+ degrees and humidity we’ve been having, Saturday night was in the low 70s in the early evening and not humid. I had on long pants, as did Pam and Jerry. We had the firepit going and NOT the fans. It was cool and quiet and pleasant. Sunday morning dawned much the same. But by the time Amy & Joe came at 5pm, it was near 90, disgustingly humid, and I had THREE fans going on the deck to keep air moving. We were doing okay until the skies opened up and RAIN started around 7pm. We’ve been in a drought, remember???? I have no inside for entertaining – my dining room is set up as a major computer lab. But I have a front porch! We relocated to the porch, I set up 2 fans there, and we had our dessert. There was no rain yesterday during the day but it started again at night and is expected to continue today and tomorrow. Within 24 hours we swung from Autumn back to Summer, from drought to rainy season. 🙂
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