Outdoor adventures

Our record-hot summer continues here in Portlandia. This weekend we've got Jersey Shore weather: overcast, muggy, 80-ish by day, 70-plus all night, feeling like a thundershower might be here in a couple of hours, but it never arrives.

Everything in the yard is a couple of weeks ahead of where it usually is. The old-lady rose bushes in the side yard are doing their thing, with a second round of red blooms more prolific than the first, which happened back at Rose Festival time.

I'll bet those plants have been there 40 years or more. Somebody put them in. I wonder who it was, where they bought them, what kind of day it was.

The cherry tomatoes next to the house started coming on about a week ago. I stood there and ate the first one I found, right off the vine, like a savage.

That was the day a monarch butterfly visited. We used to get quite a few; now you never see one. But I did that day. They're good luck.

This concludes my travel post for the last year and a half. Thanks for coming.