It would seem that the minute the calendar turned over the first day of summer, summer really began this year. We've had very warm, humid days and the pool is warming up nicely. Yesterday we spent the entire day in and around the pool. The water temperature is at a very refreshing 78 degrees; a bit chilly when you first get in but it feels wonderful once you are wet. You never know about the weather so we tend to take full advantage of good pool days when they come around. Although, this week is supposed to very hot and humid so maybe, just maybe, it will be night time skinny-dipping very soon.

I am out of shape for swimming and just managed 10 lengths. When I am used to it I normally do 30. So, I have some catching up to do. If I do 10 lengths every day I should be up to form pretty fast.

Our new cabana is lovely. With the palms, the area rug and new furniture inside, a fan that sprays cold water, it's our own little oasis. We feel like we are on vacation at a cushy resort. I think the cabana looks like something out of Arabian Nights, so we decided to call is it our chic sheik shack! Funny, eh?

The cicadas are still here but they are on the wane. We see them more now as they fly by or lie spent and dying on the grass and decks. It's sad. I keep  turning them over and they keep flipping themselves on their back again to kick at the air. I am so used to the background noise by now that it will be strange when we longer hear them. The local newspaper did print my cicada photo (this one) and gave it an inside front page spread. I was thrilled! This makes the third photo of mine to make it into the paper.

The day lilies are just now starting to bloom by the pool. We have plenty of dragonflies and even a few damsel flies which we've never seen around the pool before. The fireflies are finally showing up in greater numbers. We haven't seen as many this year it seems, but maybe they just needed a little warmth too to get them started. We sat outside last night by the pool and watched two bats swooping overhead. We used to have many more before the white nose fungus hit them so hard, so it's nice to even just see two and know that the disease didn't take them all.

I know this post isn't about Cartagena, but at least it's something! I am still sorting through the photos and trying to decide which ones to toss and which ones to feature on the blog. Don't despair, those vacation posts are coming!

Sorry about the lapse. Did anyone miss me this week? What I thought was just a cold or sinus infection turned out to be strep. So, I've not been feeling the best to say the least. I finally went to the doctor on Thursday afternoon and after one look at the pus on my right tonsil, she swabbed it for strep. The test came back a faint positive, but she said she was going for strep and the treatment as such. Three days in on the antibiotics and I am starting to come around to feeling human again. 

It didn't come at a very good time considering my mom-in-law is here visiting. Not that it stopped us much from going and doing as we had planned, but by Thursday I was dragging my butt behind me. I'm sorry I haven't been around to anyone's blogs but I just haven't felt good enough to sit and concentrate on much of anything. The pressure in my sinuses has been enough to blow my head off.

My mom-in-law's luggage finally showed up at 11:00 p.m. on Sunday night (she arrived Friday morning). She was so glad to see her own clothes again. Rick did have to take her out shopping for essentials and since those first few days that she was here were pretty darn chilly we loaned her some outerwear items. Not that she is needing them the past few days which have seen temps rise into the high 80s! She has seen quite a spectrum of weather since she arrived. We are all now huddled inside with the A/C blasting.

The 17 year cicadas have arrived and are starting to make themselves known. They mostly "sing" in the mornings and they sound different than our normal July/August cicadas. Rick found one by the shed and got to stare into its red eyes, but I have only managed to find the papery husks left over from them molting. They are more of a continuous hum than the back-and-forth banter of our own normal ones. When we first heard them I thought they were a machine running somewhere close by. I find it soothing but Rick finds it disturbing, like a plague about to land on us.

Still no fireflies. Rick and I thought we saw one the other night, but every night since when we look for them we see nothing. My mom-in-law has never seen one so we are hoping they will still make an appearance either tonight or tomorrow night before she has to leave.

The pool was opened on the 20th of May and the temperature was 54 degrees. Today we swam (yeah!) and it was 72 degrees. The new cabana is wonderful and hopefully I will have some pics to share this week.

I have more to say but I think I've at least caught you up a bit now. This is the first time I have felt like sitting here long enough to blog.

Photo: This tiny cat door was seen on our food tour of NYC last Sunday. I thought it was very cute.

My poor mother-in-law! We had bad storms here in New Jersey today and of course, this was the day she was flying in. We kept checking throughout the day and her flight kept getting delayed. She was supposed to arrive around 7:00 p.m. but was then delayed until an arrival time of 10:00 p.m. Finally she called us around 6:30 p.m. to tell us that her flight from Houston to Newark was cancelled and that she was booked on a flight from Houston to San Francisco and then on to Newark, finally arriving tomorrow morning at 7:09 a.m.

Poor woman! Nothing like flying east, then west, then way east again.

In the meantime, only since last night I seem to be coming down with a summer cold. Sore throat, tonsils swollen like golf balls, drainage, swallowing knives, aches and pains, etc. I still plan to blog about our trip to the shore but today I was blindsided by not feeling up to par. I even laid down at one point on the bed and tried to nap which is totally out of character for me. boo hoo!

Now that I've said yes to a trip to Cartagena, Colombia I need to brush up on the little I know language-wise in Spanish. I can speak enough German and French to get me into trouble, and a smidge of Dutch, but Spanish? Nope.

When we took our trip to San Miguel des Allendes, Mexico a few years back I spent some time before we went with the Rosetta Stone software for learning Spanish and did pretty well. But of course, now that I haven't spoken any Spanish in a few years I've pretty much lost all that I knew, which wasn't that much to start with. I can speak in pleasantries with como está, buenos dias/noches and the usual please, thank you, etc.  And, the important one: asking for a glass of vino tinto. 

Our roof is original to the house which was built in 1998, (oops, I meant around 1988: see Rick's comment below) so it had pretty much come to the end of its life span. Superstorm Sandy helped us out by ripping chunks of shingles off on the back side of the house. When the insurance adjuster came he said our roof was in such bad shape that more damage would be done by patching it than by replacing it. So, Sandy paid for the back side of our house which helped out a lot. Roofs are expensive! Plus, ours is a hip roof and labor costs more than a more normal roof with less pitch.

~ Where is she going with this?? ~

The crew working on our roof are all from Ecuador. They are a happy bunch and hard workers. They dangle from the peak of the roof on their ropes like monkeys on a vine. And by that I certainly don't mean any disrespect nationality-speaking, only that they look about as at home on their ropes as monkeys do on their vines. They speak a little English, but not much. They sing while they work. 

When one of them showed up at the front door, I said ¡Hola! in a perky tone of voice and was quickly rewarded for my efforts by a rapid dump of Spanish. I'm sure he could tell by the blank look on my face that ¡Hola! was the extent of my extremely limited Spanish, and that he had lost me with hello. He switched to broken English and asked if they could they please have some water. 

The whole process of taking the shingles off was pretty interesting. They tented the house with large pieces of fabric screening and slid the shingles down to the ground as if on a big slide. The noise they made as they slid sounded like the sky was falling and the dogs didn't like it one bit. I ended up putting them down in the basement where they were happy to stay. All day long I couldn't hear myself think and it was hard to concentrate on much of anything. First from the sliding shingles, then from huge booms that shook the house as the packs of shingles were dropped on the roof. After that came the pneumatic nail guns. 

They worked from 8:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Like I said in my previous post, they cleaned up pretty well by running a magnet over the grass and driveway to pick up the nails and blew pieces of shingle and other debris off the decks. 

Here you can see the new shingles against the old ones on the sun room and the garage. We think the darker color looks really nice, and we hadn't realized how much red was present in the old shingles. The new ones are high-definiton too, so they give a 3-D effect.

I will be glad when it's all over and done with! To be continued … hopefully today!!

 Blog + Rut = Blut

I know I haven't written much lately. Every time you visit you just get more photography. When I look back each day in the On This Day category in the sidebar I am reminded of some of the witty things I used to have to say. It also reminds me that I had more people following me and commenting. I'm not really sure why I don't write much anymore. Maybe because I really don't have much to say. The days go by in a blur of daily chores (grocery, walking the dogs, etc.) and I figure no one wants to read about that, plus how much can you really say about any of those subjects?

I think I've lost my voice. Every time I sit down to blog no words come into my head. My fingers sit listlessly on the keyboard until I hit the "close" tab on my blogging program without writing a word. Am I depressed? No, I don't think so, but maybe. I have no reason to be.

I pick up my knitting and make mistakes, resulting in tinking backwards to undo what I just did that I didn't want to do. Today finds me contemplating ripping the whole project as it exists to this point, (about 1/4 of the way finished)  completely back to nothing and start over again. (sorry, sis!) If I weren't such a perfectionist and instead of trying to fix my little gaffe had kept on going, chances are no one would notice. Except for me that is, and therein lies my problem. I'm going to try again to save it when I'm done here but I don't hold out much hope. Damn.

Same thing happens lately when I start a book. I can't tell you how many books I've checked out of the library in the past few weeks only to take them back with only the first few pages read. None of them grabbed my interest. I pick them up, I put them down. Unread.

We are experiencing re-roofing interruptus at the moment. The roofers came on Tuesday and got the main roof of the house ripped off and back on again. The garage roof and sun room roof have yet to be done. Yesterday they didn't come because we had heavy rain (which we sorely needed). Today it's raining again, so no roofers. Not sure about tomorrow either weather-wise since they need one whole good day without rain to finish. In the meantime they've left all their ladders and assorted paraphernalia  around. They cleaned up as best they could but we still have bits of shingle everywhere. Kind of a mess.

We managed to get our new cabana up this weekend by the pool. Photos coming as soon as the rain and the Blut is over.

Thanks for listening.

Photo: Grape hyacinths and buttercups w/azalea at Skylands (where else??)