Crisp, juicy apple pictures for your Monday

This past weekend was just what I needed...and you know how rarely a weekend is good enough to make up for a bad week. Saturday was gloriously sunny, breezy, and warm. Meester and I decided to leave the yardwork and housework behind and head out to an apple orchard that we hadn't visited for a couple years. The past couple years of Iowa weather have been bad for orchards, but this year there's a plentiful crop of apples.

I love picking my own apples, and look how scrawny toned my legs look from hiking a couple miles to do it.

Of course, the best apples are always out of reach.

Just-picked-fresh apples, blemishes and all.

You should smell the inside of this bag of apple cider donuts!

Sunday I made Apple Dapple Cupcakes, enough to share with some friends. Thanks for the recipe, Monet!

Bad day makes a bad girl

Gah,this was the worst week at the office. I was so fried by the end of the day on Friday that I just went bad and threw this empty glass tea bottle in the trash.

I am usually diligent about recycling but I didn't have an ounce of energy in me to walk to the bathroom to rinse out the bottle, peel off the label, and walk to the office recycling bin. Now I will probably feel guilty all weekend, and come into the office on Monday and dig through the trash for that bottle. Or someone else will spy that bottle in the trash...and when I come in on Monday there will be a snarky note posted over the trash can about "What bad co-worker didn't recycle this glass bottle?"

Oh, sometimes it's the littlest things that exhaust us the most.

Random Ramblings

It's so hot out, and the humidity today was about a gazillion percent. I went outside for a walk, but my brain melted, so I took a few random pictures with my iPhone and that's about it.

One last little daylily hiding behind a big clump of ornamental grasses.

We don't have a vegetable garden, but we have a wonderful friend who shares the bounty from his garden. He gave us cherry tomatoes, and I have been eating them like candy.

Not sure what these lovely striped flowers are, but I know they escaped from my neighbor's garden. Yay - free flowers!

It cannot be apple time - it can't be Fall already! I was going to walk to where I had seen an apple tree loaded with apples, but gave up (remember, the humidity was a gazillion percent) and took a picture of a nearby tree with a few gnarly apples.

School starts tomorrow, which guarantees it will be the hottest day of the year, not to mention the most annoying and insane traffic of the year.

Why can it be so hard for women to relax?

Some of the comments on my last post reminded me of how so many of us women bloggers identify with the idea of relaxing, but can't seem to actually do it. We post or comment about sitting down with a cold drink, or enjoying a nice long bubble bath, or maybe we'll sit on a garden bench in our next life...but we're busy hammering out those thoughts on our keyboards...and then it's off to the next task.

Maybe it's a peculiarity of women bloggers. I read somewhere that producing a good blog requires a minimum of 15 - 20 hours a week. Between my full-time job and my obsessive-compulsive housekeeping...I'm lucky to put in 5 hours a week on my blog(anyway, that's a good excuse for the mediocrity of my blog). But blogging does take time and an active mind, and isn't that the opposite of relaxing?

The last time I dozed off in the middle of the day - I think I was 5 years old and it was "nap-time" in kindergarten. Now if I sit down during the day, my mind remains active and I soon realize that there is something, somewhere, that remains undone - and off I go to do it.

Maybe this is a gender issue that goes back to the dawn of mankind, when survival of the next generation was the primary responsibility of "cavemommy"...no surrogate mothers back then. No baby bottles and formula... little cavebabies couldn't survive without constant attention and breastfeeding from their cavemommies. I'm pretty sure if ESPN had existed back then...cavemen wouldn't have realized a cavebaby was crying until "Half-time". Women had to be on constant alert to ensure the survival of their families - and then they died when they were about 30...no relaxing years of retirement back then either.

Meester has no problem relaxing. He'll inquire why I'm fussing with laundry while complaining about being exhausted from my job, and suggest that the laundry will wait till tomorrow. I'll reply "Have you noticed that you have no clean underwear?" Nope, he hadn't even noticed. I'm constantly declaring that if it wasn't for women...men would still be living in caves...wearing dirty underwear. We can't relax and allow that.

I'm hitting "Publish Post" and heading to the laundry room.....

Doesn't my garden bench look idyllic?

I had dreams of lazy summer afternoons and gentle summer evenings spent with a book and an iced beverage...sitting on this bench enjoying the hum of bees, birdsong, and the sighing of wind in the trees.....maybe watching the last rays of sunlight filter through the trees to brighten a flower or hosta leaf with gold.

I was so wrong! The 100% percent humidity outside is exceeded only by the millions of mosquitoes, gnats, and "no-see-ums" swarming around the yard. If the heat doesn't drive me in the house, then the relentless insect bites do. An easy, idyllic summer afternoon apparently exists only in my imagination...at least in Iowa anyway. Iowa summers can be brutal.

And honestly...I can't sit still on a bench for that long...without noticing weeds that need pulling, flowers that need deadheading, shrubs that need pruning, etc., etc. Think the problem is me? Maybe while I'm pulling weeds and swatting mosquitoes, I'll just daydream about sitting on that bench.....

An old love from summers past

I can't forget the love of my childhood summers - an old black oscillating fan. Since we didn't have central A/C, there were desktop fans around the house, and a big box fan in the stairway window.

This picture is far classier than the actual fan of my childhood - a plain black bullet-back fan with big black blades that I was sure could cut fingers off if they got too close. My sisters and I were always careful to stick only hot dogs, and carrots, and sheets of paper, into the blades to see if we could make flying slices of anything - just like the cartoons. Didn't work.

We didn't dare try sticking anything into the big box fan in the window. We knew our parents would kill us if we messed with what passed for central A/C in our house. But the black fan resided in the children's bedroom, and so it was treated like any other plaything. (Yes, back then siblings usually shared one bedroom, but it was a big old room.)

Our beds were lined up against one wall, and the fan sat atop our dresser and was pointed in our direction. Our mother was sure that a fan blowing right on us would cause pneumonia, so every night she tilted the face of that heavy black fan upward, then turned out the lights. I would bounce right out of bed and point the fan downward straight at my spot on the double bed that I shared with a sister. There was no more delightful feeling at nighttime than the swish of lukewarm air back and forth across my sticky little body, encased in my favorite pink baby-doll pajamas. The soft whir of fan blades was the lullaby music of a whole generation of Baby Boomers.

In the deep August heat of my summers now...lying in the stale, sterile air of central A/C, as the big central A/C compressor chugs away outside...I often miss the gentle whir of those old fan blades.....

Summer doldrums

August already?!?! Summer flies by too fast. And when did August become such a busy month, with the start of every extra-curricular school activity, and the month-long back-to-school buying sprees, and why does school actually begin in August now? What happened to the traditional 3 months of summer break?

I don't even have children in school anymore, and yet I'm nostalgic for the old slow Midwestern summers that I remember from when I was a child. Which was so long ago - yikes! - that central air-conditioning was rare...and we didn't have it.

When I was a kid, August seemed like the longest, slowest month of the year. The August air was languid with heat and humidity, and filled with the background music of cicadas singing.

I'd sit on a blanket outside, with my best girlfriend "L", under the shade of huge maple and elm trees. (how I miss those magnificent elms) We'd pick dandelions and white clover to make necklaces and bridal bouquets for our Barbie dolls. We'd taste the sweet clover and make faces tasting sourgrass. (A pleasant and safe summer activity, since no one treated their lawns with chemicals to kill everything back then.)

If "L" couldn't play, I'd hang out in the house...lying on the floor where the air was cooler. (no air-conditioning, remember?) My paternal widowed grandfather lived with us; he spent every summer tending the green beans and tomato plants in our backyard garden and listening to broadcasts of the Chicago White Sox baseball games on the radio in our living room. (not much programming on tv back then, either) I had no idea what "bottom of the 3rd with two men left on base" meant, but the mellow voice of the announcer droning each play would put me in a pleasant drowsy haze.

And our family always took our summer vacation, to some small lakeside resort in Wisconsin or Minnesota, the last week or two of August. The end of our vacation always signaled the end of summer.

"Summertime and the living is easy" was true back then, but maybe it was because I was just a kid and had no lawn to mow, no meals to cook, nor bills to pay. Or has the wonder of air-conditioning, and 24-hour tv programming, and computer video games...just speeded up life somehow? Or am I just sounding like a nostalgic old lady?! How do you remember the Augusts of summer?