My Summer Bucket List

Back in May, I read a blog by Jason Kotecky at  http://kimandjason.com/blog/  where he made a summer bucket list.  Here's what Jason came up with:



I decided I needed a summer bucket list, too, so the summer doesn't slip away without my doing anything DIFFERENT from the norm.  Mine wasn't nearly as artistic as Jason's, but it'll do:

1 park concert

1 live theater performance (inside a theater)

Shakespeare in the Park (Noblesville)

1 free outdoor classic movie

Fireworks – Noblesville?   Indy?  Cicero (over the lake)?

Indianapolis City Market farmers market day (Wednesdays)

Noblesville farmers market (Saturday)

Westfield farmers market

Carmel farmers market

Visit 3 state parks (choir retreat doesn’t count)

1 camping trip
1 overnight backpack trip

Use my camp dutch oven 1 time

Use the grill 1 time

Sit on the porch 1 time/week

Sit on the patio 1 time/week

Visit the State Museum

Go to the State Fair

Go to 1 garage sale

Go to the Strawtown flea market 1 time

Art on the Square (Noblesville)

Visit an antique shop

See all 46 of the Indianapolis murals painted for the Super Bowl

Go to a festival in a different town (Elwood glass festival, Tipton pork festival, etc.)

Hmmm...  Quite a long list - somewhat ambitious.  Let's see what I've done so far.


I went to my first outdoor classic movie last night - The Awful Truth starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunn.  What a hoot!  I'm looking forward to more.

I haven't been to the farmers market here yet, but I've been to the one at the Indianapolis City Market four times.  I've bought kale, tomatoes, bakery goods, and a crock pot curry lentil mix.  And of course, it's always a great place to eat lunch, even when it's not market day.  I've visited the Carmel farmers market, but not Westfield's or Fishers'.

I'm sitting on my porch right now, and I've become a fixture out here on the days it's been nice enough (that means when it's not a hundred and four degrees).  This weekend has been perfect porch and patio weather.  I've been out on the patio, too, but not as much as the porch.

I've seen several of the Super Bowl murals.  There are ten on the canal in downtown Indianapolis near my office, so I've seen those, plus a few more.  Here's the website:

http://www.artscouncilofindianapolis.org/murals/

There are maps and pictures and all kinds of information about the murals.  This is one of my favorites.



I had planned on going to a fireworks show, but Cicero's was cancelled because of the dry conditions, I didn't feel like driving all the way to downtown Indianapolis, and it was so hot, I couldn't stand the thought of sitting outside in the heat for the Noblesville show, so I went to bed instead.  I actually HEARD the Noblesville fireworks while I was lying there.  Kind of cozy- like lying in bed during a thunderstorm.


I haven't been able to use my grill or dutch oven because of the burn ban here.

Shakespeare in the park started last night.  I'm planning to go Thursday or Friday.


Art on the Square and the State Fair are in a couple of weeks, and there are lots of free movies and concerts in the parks still to come.  The farmers markets mostly run through October.  Plenty of time!


Then there's a camping trip and visiting some state parks.  Hmmmm...  If you read the previous blog post, you'll know how THAT worked out.


All in all, I think I've done well enough with my list.  Not spectacularly, but the goal isn't to do EVERYTHING on the list, but to CONSIDER everything on the list, and actually DO some of them.


What's on YOUR bucket list?

My 100+ Degree Camping Trip

We're having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave.  The temperature's rising; it isn't surprising... - Irving Berlin

I took a solo camping trip this weekend.   Part of the point of this trip was to get me out of the house and my car out of the garage so That Man could work on the race car in the garage.

In case you've been living in a cave or something, we here in the Midwest (and plenty of the rest of the country) are not only in the midst of a drought, but a heat wave, and NOT a tropical heat wave, either.  We're having desert weather.  (Put down your fork - I said desert, not dessert.)

Indiana summers are normally swelteringly humid and miserable, but June was hot and unbelievably dry.  This is our driest and hottest summer since 1988.

We've been flirting with 100 degrees for the past few weeks.  Heck, we've gotten past the flirting stage.  We hit 104 and 105 officially last week, and the outside thermometer in my car read 110 while I was driving one evening.  It was supposed to moderate a bit (you know you're in trouble when the forecast highs have DROPPED to the mid- to high nineties), but now we're right back up there with temperatures over 100.

The grass in our yard has mostly gone dormant and dead brown, except for what's in the shade of the maple trees in the front yard.  The back yard is toast.  We don't like to water the yard because that makes the roots shallow, but it's tempting.  (Be strong!)  Even if we wanted to, we're under watering restrictions.  People with even addresses can water on Mondays and Wednesdays, and people with odd addresses can water on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  It reminds me of the late 1970s when we could only buy gas on alternating days.  I had an odd license plate number, so I could fill up on odd dates, but not on evens.

But I digress...

I had planned this camping trip specifically to get out from under That Man's feet, and, well, to go camping.  I made reservations at a state park I've never visited before and started assembling the equipment.  I gathered up the coolers, water jug, sleeping bag, pillow, cot, made lists of clothes and food, and planned my driving route.  What's missing?

I couldn't find my tent.

It's been 4 years since I've been able to get away and camp.  You know, elderly parents and all that entails. So, I wasn't exactly sure where the tent was.  I asked The Man.  He said he'd moved "all the tents" out of the shed and garages and he thought "they" probably were in the attic.  Well, I knew where my backpacking tent is, and it's not in the attic, but of course, that's not the tent I wanted.  I wanted my dome tent.

I climbed into the attic, and there was a (yes ONE) tent bag.  Oh joy!  There it is!  Got it down and into the back yard, unzipped the bag, dumped out the tent and unrolled it.  Wrong tent.  It was a huge multi-room tent I'd bought several years ago for The Girl's Girl Scout troop.  So where the heck was the dome tent?  Had I  imagined buying it?  I thought I was going crazy.

Well, I HAD to have a tent, for Pete's sake, so I started shopping.  There were small tents (sorry, I have one, thanks) and huge tents (ditto).  Where were the mid-size tents?  Nuttin' nowhere.  RATS.

Meanwhile, I was going over my lists and looking for my camping stuff.  Most of it is in plastic storage boxes on shelves in the laundry/mud room.  So, I was scanning the shelves and mentally checking things off my lists, and lo and behold - there was a tent bag and a canopy box, staring me in the face, on the shelf over the treadmill, in plain sight every time I leave the house.

Good grief.

So I grabbed the tent bag and the canopy box and started packing!  Yee-haw!  I'm going CAMPING!

One problem.  The temperature.  The temperature had moderated during the week, but the forecast for this weekend was right back up there.  Oh, I've camped at 100 degrees before.  I packed a box fan and a heavy duty outdoor electrical cord so I could have an artificial breeze.  No problemo.

I  took my time driving south (SOUTH!  In this heat, why didn't I decide to head for Michigan?)  toward Harmonie State Park.  Once I got on the other side of Indianapolis, I left the interstate and took my time, driving state highways through the country and small towns.  The corn in the fields looked strange because the leaves are tightly rolled, avoiding the sun and conserving moisture.  Some trees are doing the same.

I arrived at the park, checked in, and found my space.  The thermometer in my car read 103.  Oh my.  The picnic table for my space was all the way out by the road, so I started by dragging it back under a tree.  My word.  Then I spread out the ground cloth and dumped the tent bag onto the picnic table and unzipped it.  I found another ground cloth, stakes, poles, instructions, rain fly...

No tent.

Oh.  My.  Gosh.

No tent.


NO TENT!!!


And the sweat  was dripping off me like I'd been hosed down.  Totally.  Gross.


To make a long story short, I surrendered.  I gave up.  I quit.  This camping trip just wasn't meant to be.  So I put everything back in the car and headed back home.  On the interstate.  When I got home, That Man had gone to work, so I texted him to say I had come back home.

He replied, "Did you have a nice drive?"

What a guy!

[NOTE:  The tent was in a box UNDER the tent bag.  I didn't check it.  Typical.]

Living the Wild Life

HA!

Made you look!!!

Well, maybe a more accurate title would be "Living with Wildlife."  Yes, it's nearly Midsummer's Eve, and the critters are trying to move in with us.  Again.

If you know me, you know that I LOVE nature and go crazy over the rabbits, toads, birds, garter snakes, and the occasional deer or coyote we see in our yard.

But I am a firm believer that the wildlife needs to stay OUTSIDE.  PLEASE.

It happens every year.  SOMETHING decides it's too hot outside, so, gee whiz, let's move into that nice air-conditioned house that sits so conveniently in our ecosystem.

One year, it was crickets.  They snuck inside (yes, I know snuck isn't really a word, but I like it, so just get over it) and we could hardly sleep for the chirping.  Plus, The Girl decided that she was afraid of them, especially after finding them in her shoes.  (Oh, come ON.  Show some backbone!)  The Boy was fairly stoic about it all.  Of course, he didn't find any creepy crawlies in his footwear, either.

We finally banished the crickets.  Next came the mice.

Now THERE'S fun!

We could hear them gnawing in the walls.  Yuck.  We found their calling cards on the pantry shelves.  DOUBLE yuck.  We fought the mouse wars off and on, finding their entrances and plugging them, but they would eventually find another way in.  Even after we got cats! 

Our cats weren't the greatest mousers, preferring to chase flies and spiders, until we adopted The Great Orange Hunter.  Tango has a talent, and that's catching mice.  He always leaves them where we can easily find them (I've left you a love token - am I not a mighty hunter?) - like in The Girl's shoes.  
What IS it about her shoes?

We had moths (don't keep sunflower birdseed from one year to the next - TRUST ME).  We had grasshoppers. We had Asian ladybugs.  We had termites.  We had ants.  We always have raccoons knocking down the bird feeders.  But usually these things happen one at a time.

Well.

This is the year of multiple plagues.  Every spring I wage war on the carpenter bees, who like to chew tunnels into our front porch.  They start in May, and they take over the airspace on the front porch, buzzing around and dive-bombing anything that moves.  You can sit there and hear them chomping away in the evening after they've retired to their hangars.  They sound like mice!  So I buy wasp and hornet spray and squirt it into their holes, and out they come, falling on their backs and flailing their legs.  If I'm a little later, out come their larvae - large, unattractive white squirmy things - UGH.

This year, I procrastinated on the bees.  We had other issues with Nature.  Chipmunks.

That Man was working on a project in the driveway, and left the garage door open most of the afternoon.  Later, he and The Boy reported seeing a flash of brown fur in the garage.  We found the telltale signs - little holes chewed near the bottom of the sunflower seed bag in the garage.  A couple of days later, I was sitting on the patio and heard something chewing on the house.  From the INSIDE.

(Is it just me, or do most of the critters want to eat either the house or the birdseed?)

That Man set a live trap in the garage for the chipmunk, which had apparently made its way into the crawlspace from the garage.  The trap did its work and the chipmunk is no longer in residence.  However, there is still a small furry army still beseiging us outside, so the trap went back out onto the porch, where the brazen little demons sit and chatter.

In the meantime, I was planning to attack the bees, but before I got to start, The Boy woke up this past Saturday to someone knocking.  Two someones.  On the porch railing.

Woodpeckers.  They were systematically tearing chunks of wood out of a section of the porch railing, following a bee tunnel.  My friend Brenda used to work for the Audubon Society, and she says if you have woodpeckers pecking on your house, then you have an insect problem.  Big surprise!!!

Well, the woodpeckers were, but the insects were not.  Those birds were after the carpenter bees.  The Boy scared them off, but they returned.  With reinforcements.

So, I was forced to stop procrastinating and work on the bees.  I've sprayed about half of their holes, and the inmates have been evicted.  My friend Resa says the next step is to jam wads of steel wool into the burrows with a pencil, seal them up with wood putty, and then paint.

Oh, goody.

I'm willing to do all that, but the woodpeckers are persistent.  I don't want them to pull out the steel wool and putty, so how to keep them away while everything sets up?

That Man set the chipmunk trap on the railing where the woodpeckers have been working their brand of magic.  Genius!

So we will see what we see when we see it, regarding the birds and the bees.

I was starting to feel like I was in Egypt before the Exodus.  At least we haven't had frogs, flies, boils, or hail, but we WILL have locusts (oh, all right, cicadas) in August.

Cross your fingers!

Race Car Trailers and Enthusiasm

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about. - Charles Kingsley

You want to see enthusiasm?  Just ask That Man about drag racing.  Oh my.  It's an obsession.

Two weeks ago, he and That Girl went racing.  It was a sunny, hot weekend.  They were hot and sweaty and exhausted by the time it was over.  Saturday wasn't too bad - he ran one round, put the car in the trailer, and headed for dinner and the motel.  Time to cool off, rest, and recuperate.  But Sunday, he kept winning rounds, and the turnaround time got shorter and shorter.  Not much time to rest, and no place to get really cool.  Oh, they had a fan set up, and they had shade from the awning, but compared to the guys who pull their trailers with motor homes...well! Both of them came back looking like boiled lobsters. But, long story short, he came in third in his class!

We'd had that trailer for 23 years, and it was a big step up from the old open trailer.  We'd go racing with no lights, no awning, nothing.  Talk about primitive!  And then we made the change to an enclosed trailer with an awning.  We thought we were in HEAVEN, even though it was still hot as You-Know-Where when the outside temperatures soared.

Well, a week ago, he came home with a new race car trailer, and he's spent the past week getting it ready.  So what could there possibly be to do?  It was made to his specifications.  Just winch the car in, stick the generator in its spot, and away you go!

Well, not quite.

The winch cable is too short.  The D-rings in the floor to tie down the car were installed backward.  There is no shelf in the base cabinet.  He broke off the antenna on the side of the trailer, trying to adjust it.  The list grows.  But here's a view of the interior: 

And a view of the exterior:

It's mighty nice - a huge improvement over the old trailer.  Shiny and new.  Lots of light. More space.  A bigger awning.  No wood to rot.  Non-skid floor.  AIR CONDITIONING.  He will be racing in "comfort and luxury," relatively speaking.

So, will all this decadence improve his results?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  That Man LOVES to race his car.  He has ENTHUSIASM!  Isn't THAT what counts?