June started on a high note with the tail end of our fun Florida Keys trip. We of course arrived back from Florida to near constant 100 degree temperatures. It did rain once in June, a couple inches even (yay!), but we’ve seen little moisture or relief from the heat since then.

Pride of Barbados is one of the few things thriving in our yard.

As seems to happen sometimes with vacations, we arrived back to a string of small difficulties. The RAID array where we store our photos, music, movies, and other important information died. We’re guessing a combination of old age and cat fur was the culprit. Then we woke up one morning to the hose leading to our washing machine spouting a little fountain of water onto the floor. Thankfully that didn’t happen while we were gone for a week, but it clearly had been going on for a while because there was a lot of standing water on the floor, and some had traveled to our garage as well. We wound up taking part of the day off to replace the hose and get all the water and water-damaged things cleaned up. Both these things were relatively manageable fixes.

The other mess revolved around our trees. We knew we needed to get them trimmed and I had been communicating with our normal tree service for a while, trying to get on their schedule. Several trees are still sporting limbs that died during the Snowpocalypse of 2021. Many of the trees are simply at the end of their lifespan. We needed them taken care of. Since it’s 100 effing degrees every day, I wind up spending time each morning watering some quantity of our plants. One morning, maybe a minute or two after I had just been out watering, Sean and I heard a massive whump sound in the back yard. One of the trees dropped a huge limb right where I had just been working. I am not sure I’d have died, but I betcha I’d have ended up in the hospital had I lingered out there a bit too long.

Not visible here is the big thick trunk of the branch.

Our tree people will be removing that tree entirely; it’s an ornamental pear that’s probably a decade older than anyone had any right to expect it to live. We’re hoping the other trees are watching and see what happens when you try to kill April with your branches.

Maya painted a little birdhouse years ago, and it has hosted at least one round of wrens and their babies in the past. Sean and I popped the top off of it earlier in the year so I could clean it out properly and then he could glue it back together. The wrens must have enjoyed a clean house because we got to see another little family of wrens come into being. We watched the diligent nest building and later the furious feeding after the eggs hatched. I loved walking by the house hearing the little peep-peep-peep sounds emanating from it.

Red-eared Slider

One morning around mid-month, we were astonished to find a turtle in the back yard. The kids checked it out a bit before photographing it and letting it wander on its merry way. Ian looked in his reptile and amphibian book and discovered it was a Red-eared Slider. There are no ponds near us (that I know of) but everything says you shouldn’t try to relocate them, and so we left it to wander.

Note Sean’s ingenuity on the floaty-front.

Father’s Day weekend was full of activity. On Friday, we took the kids to the Alamo Drafthouse to eat dinner and watch Lightyear. On Saturday, since the only acceptable outdoor activity right now is swimming, we took the kids to Blanco State Park and spent a few glorious hours submerged in water. We had lunch afterward at Redbud Cafe, which turned out to be quite pleasant.

Metal straws!

On Sunday, much like Mother’s Day the month before, we kept things low-key. We did our best to let Dad sleep in. Once he was up and about, the kids were too excited to wait for long. We opened gifts fairly early on. Sean received some tiki head shaped glasses much like the ones we had used in Key West to consume Mai Tais. He also got some metal straws which we thought might be fun for cocktails and mocktails.

Serpent Swirl!

As I mentioned in the Florida Keys post, the kids got really into making their own mocktails one afternoon while sitting at a restaurant, using ingredients from their flavored water and our cocktails to craft their own. After that, they had spent a few glorious sessions chatting over ingredients and writing down their creations in notebooks and on sticky notes. They pulled all of this out for Father’s Day. The kids each made him their own specialty mocktail, and it sounds like he enjoyed both of them.

Ian made a Serpent Swirl. To a base of Sprite, he added the juice of half a lime and half a lemon. Next he added an ounce each of store-bought apple juice and homemade grenadine. He added some ice and stirred until the sides of the glass felt nice and cold.

Maya made a Sea of Snowflakes. She combined a cup of soda water and a quarter cup of coconut water. Into this, she smashed about 8 chocolate mint leaves and left them in the drink. She wanted to add a tablespoon of sugar, but we ultimately decided on a tablespoon of simple syrup instead, so we wouldn’t obliterate our bubbles in trying to dissolve the sugar.

Breakfast for lunch!

Sean tells me he loved them both, and I was impressed with just how different and unique the drinks were. Well done, children!

The kids each tried their own drink and all of this was served with breakfast-for-lunch, a family favorite. Later that evening, I made a Sean-friendly dinner as well: Philly cheesesteaks and Brussels sprouts roasted in bacon grease.

The rest of our month was kind of a non-event. The kids were attending a summer program that they seemed to dislike. I was annoyed because it didn’t seem to live up to what we were sold. Field trips! Projects to stimulate their brains but still have fun! Even more projects announced in class! A couple of these things materialized, but mostly it was just show up, play, go home. We made a mad dash to find alternate care for July and early August, and we’ve mostly succeeded. Guess we’ll have to try a different approach next summer.

I managed to cut my finger AGAIN. This time, I took a nice slice off the end of my left index finger. It bled a lot but there was no point going to emergency care for that one. I kept it covered and treated regularly with antibiotic ointment, and after a couple weeks, finally started going around without a bandage on. It’s still very tender, but it doesn’t slow me down as much now that it’s not an open wound that I need to keep clean.

Nox may have been the only one who liked cleaning

Since it was too hot to go outside and my finger was too wounded for me to do much yard work or cooking, we went on a bit of a going-though-old-stuff bender. Maya and I collected up and reorganized the art supplies. The four of us went through the kids’ shelving and took a lot of stuff to the Salvation Army, with another load needing to go soon. I think we intend to continue that trend a bit here in July, since it’s still way WAY too hot to do anything useful outdoors.

Things are looking a lot better and the kids are starting to know where to look for their stuff and where to put it away, which is a positive. The Big Bad is going to be their rooms. We’ve probably given them way too much autonomy over the years, and we’re reaping the rewards now. Maya can’t bear to part with anything. Ian’s version of cleaning is to shove everything into a drawer, cabinet, or closet as quickly as he can and hope the door still shuts. It should be a traumatic experience for all of us.

Our kids sometimes have too much free time

True to my word, I’m done posting COVID stats. However, it’s still lingering in my mind, impacting at least some of our decisions still, causing concern. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time, but to our knowledge, none of us has caught it yet. With each fresh variant being more contagious, I’m sure our day is coming soon. We still hear about coworkers and family members getting sick. And still, the symptoms and severity are pretty variable. All in all though, we plan to move cautiously forward.

Toward the end of June, the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade. With family members falling fairly wide on either side of the fence, I’m not sure how much I feel like spouting off about my particular views. But no matter my opinion, it’s fair to say that the decision is historic. And I think it’s also fair to be concerned about how this might impact marriage rights and privacy rights and contraceptive rights. With reports of hospitals doing things like letting ectopic pregnancies rupture before they’ll intervene and Texas suing over the federal guidance that abortion must be an option if the mother’s life is at risk, I can’t help but worry about the direction things are going.