Notes For Me ( and You)

With the swimming season wrapping up tonight with the end of season banquet, we are offically in mid-summer. Mid, that is as in between swimming and football. This is our best slot for a vacation and we will be heading off for a few days shortly.

Only problem with vacation this time of year is that the garden is just coming into full flow. This means that our designated water person will be amply rewarded for coming by every other day.

So far the report on the garden would be bush beans A, pole beans B-(growing well, but the pods become too seedy too quickly). Tomatoes – still to early to tell, same with cucumbers and squash.

It has been a dry July – after all the rain before – but the past few days have once again brought on the afternoon storms to freshen up the rapidly browning grass.

This is the peak of the outdoor swim season, with various meets almost every day for a few days. Here in Montgomery County we are fortunate to have what is believed to be the most competitive, most heavily supported, summer swim season probably anywhere. Each neighborhood pool fields a team with boys and girls from 6 or 7 years old up to 18 year old, many of whom have been of at college for a year. The points scored by the 7 year old count just as much as the 18 year old! The really cool thing about the culture in which these swimmers grow up is that you are never to good to swim for your local pool.

This weekend Jake was (un)fortunate to be going head to head – actually head to chest would be more accurate, since this kid, Jack Conger, is at least 6 foot tall at 14 years old – with the USA national record holder ( 13-14) in 200 meters back. Who held the record before – a certain Michael Phelps! Of course Jake lost – big time – but if this youth goes on to fulfill his potential, we may be watching him on the TV soon.

Great weather for all this swimming – not too hot, and the cycle of constant storms we were in for a few weeks has stopped. I actually have had to water the garden now.

After a busy 4th of July – swim meet, pool picnic, and neighborhood cookout – it was nice to have a rather peaceful Sunday.  I just picked some beans, zucchini  and dug some potatoes, all for the first time.  The potatoes were on the small side, but very nice looking and tasty.

The zucchini plants were looking rather weak and pale, so I top dressed them with a little dried blood. I think over the winter I really need to get some serious manure and/or compost into these beds in preparation for next season.

I’ve been playing around a lot with the swim team web site
with the latest addition a little slide show as a preview for the photo gallery. However although the web site is running well, we are still having email issues – mostly because many companies are tagging our emails as spam, perhaps because some less than savory companies might be sharing my hosting company. So our next step is to explore using the Google Apps to handle our group email.