Brain Cloud

I have a brain cloud. I don't know its source, and as I learned from Tom Hanks--it's not fatal--but it does make getting the BUCKETS of work I have on my desk done challenging.

I think the bigger issue is just that I can't get back on EST to save my life. I can't get up in the morning. I can't fall asleep at night. This is causing me to sit at my desk and stare at my computer and drool a lot.

In other news--my garden may be tested for doping soon. Every plant in it (except for the lettuce, which is being overrun by the viney things) is ten times its normal size and producing copious amounts of produce. I already have a zucchini the size of my head. Zucchini on July 10th? I thought that was an August phenomenon. After all, National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor's Porch Night is August 8th. That's a whole month away. Did you know that there is the same amount of Potassium in one cup of zucchini as there is in a large banana? The stuff is good for you. (And I love it fried in butter.)

I caught some big (shiny) beetles on the beans today. They were all in the same area--but decimating that one area. I got a pair of scissors and cut the foliage off and threw it and the beetles (still gorging themselves) onto the lawn of the neighbors whose dog bit our dog. (Okay, not really--but I thought about it. Instead I tossed it by the road and tried to remember to look in my gardening books to find a better solution.

The tomato plants are so HUGE--they really are amazing. In all my tomato gardening years (all three of them, spread out with other years in between) I've never seen tomato plants like this. They're tomato BUSHES. They could be tomato privacy bushes. For two months I very carefully picked off all of the sucker branches--but I gave up about three weeks ago when I couldn't really see into the mass of tomato branches and leaves anymore. Apparently the rain and the horse manure have combined to create The HULK versions of roma tomato plants.

My grape-tomato plant in the planter on the back porch--the one that shrugged off the hard frosts like they were an August evening--has produced about a dozen ripe grape tomatoes. I didn't have time to make a salad yesterday, so I picked them and put them in a glass dish and shoved them in the fridge. This evening I put them in a cup and dumped half a cup of cottage cheese on top of them.

Oh. my. heck. I have never, ever, ever had such sweet, flavorful tomatoes in my life. They burst right through the cottage cheese taste and I just had to blog my joy because I know my kids would just never understand.

But this batch of tomatoes was ahead of the rest of the plant and the next batch is still a vibrant green. It will be at least another week before I get more like them.

Then there are the pickling cucumbers. I didn't expect to see them out yet already either! But there they are. I don't see any smooth cucumbers--so either the "slicing" cucumbers were mislabeled, or they produce later. Right now all the vines that are producing are growing the same "I look like a pickle" cucumbers. I need to put a call into the aunts and find out what to do with the cucumbers now that I have them. I have not ever pickled anything before.

The sugar snap peas are sugar snap peas. They're delicious and doing well--at least until the beetles showed up today. Here's hoping they won't come back.

And now I have read Max a story, I have put Milo back to bed for the third time, I have balanced the checkbooks . . . back to work.