The Pepper Thief and Neverending July – an Update

First – the Pepper Thief. It would seem the bandit that ate my first set of peppers down to nubs may not have been 4-legged; I may have been off by a few sets of legs 🙁 I was out checking out the man-eating cucumber plant that has taken over the entire bed, and realized my pepper plants aren’t just being engulfed with the cuke – they are almost down to nubs again, with the few actual peppers that were started about all that was left on a couple of them! I reached down to pull back a leaf (or what was left of it)to look under it, and realized I wasn’t actually touching a stem, I was touching THIS:

I don’t know if he was the only one out there or not – I haven’t seen any others, but I didn’t see this one, either, until I touched it 🙁 Wasps are one of their natural deterrents, and we’ve got LOTS of those, but they don’t seem to be spending enough time in the garden. So this just might not be a good year for peppers (though, like last year with all the rain, they didn’t really take off until late August/September anyway, so maybe they’ll bounce back), but the cucumbers are insane! The first pick, yesterday, gave us these:

Neverending July gave us 2 weeks of band camp – week one was just evenings, week two, last week, was all day M-F and preview show on Saturday. School starts on Friday (realllyy hate Friday starts, but it’s the last one we’ll have, so…) August 8th, so evening practices up until then. We got a little behind on week one, I guess, because we lost one of our football players, who’d had a brain tumor removed last year, and I guess had been fighting the cancer all the time since; so that put a bit of a damper on the start to the season. This year’s show is DISTANT, which features music related to space, planets, that kind of thing. The first two songs they’ve got down are a piece from Tron, and Mars, the Bringer of War by Holst. I became familiar with Holst’s The Planets right after Gladiator came out, and I recognized similarities between Zimmer’s soundtrack and Holst’s work.

Hopefully the Kid doesn’t revert back to Night Owl in the next 9 days – I left this morning with alarm clock buzzing away and lights on over his head – he didn’t move, even when I hollered the 3rd time. One more year, one more year, one more year….

In stitching news, I have another finish!!! Beaded Dragonfly Tile is DONE! Done as charted except for one minor change – the inner border that you see here in the color-changing Waterlilies thread was charted for black – which doesn’t work as well on black fabric, even when changing it to black metallic (which I did on MMM03, and while you can see it, you gotta LOOK for it – so Plan C for this one). Glad to have this one DONE, after 2 solid months of uplights, used up batteries, and magnifiers – was starting to get a serious case of walleye!

And now for some bling:

Since I had the July edition of PINS on Saturday, I had to decide what to take with; strangely enough, Witches Wheel managed to jump out of its drawer and right into my bag Saturday morning, and that is what got worked on not only at PINS, but for the rest of the weekend:

Ignore the frog that was harboring in the flying witch on the right; it attacked the one on the left the last time I had it out, too; I have a feeling I’m going to have frogs in all 4 of those 🙁 But I am very close to 1/2 done with the stitching already, so since this was tentatively on my To Finish List, I guess I’ll just keep on keeping on with it 🙂 Speaking of that list:

• Iris Fairy – Completed 2/2/14
• Halloween Rules – Completed 3/9/14
• Both versions of the Ink Circles Roll Your Own mandala that I have going (1 saw progress a couple of weeks ago)
• Dragonfly Tile – Completed 7/25/14
• Romeo – Completed 2/16/14
• Samplar 4 Saisons (only 3 pages left to go!)
• And maybe Witch’s Wheel

Well, that’s the news from here – it’s still July (have you noticed July fills almost 5 full weeks this year? Like it got Leaped or something), and I’ve been thinking about the fair; I don’t think I’ll be entering this year, since I have nothing framed, and I guess the Kid would like clothes for school, so I don’t see frames being ordered in the next couple of weeks. Good, one less thing to contend with this fall! I’ve got enough going on between work (boss is retiring, soon; 2 major upgrades; CMII training x2) and Senior Year. Fortunately, I have plenty of stitching to give me the much-needed de-stressing 🙂 Until next week, Happy Stitching!