70/365 Ichneumon

Click to view bigger. I believe I have yet another new creepy bug in my garden. From my extensive internet research (that is said tongue in cheek, to be clear), I believe I have a parasitic wasp. Specifically, an ichneumon wasp. It was certainly giant. But it did not have the funky loop shaped ovipositor, so I debated that maybe I was on the wrong track. But a couple of websites pointed out that male ichneumon wasps exist as well...I don't know. Does anyone out there know anything about ichneumons? This is a picture taken with my phone (my camera is still resting comfortably at my mother-in-law's house) and so it's abysmal. But trust me, it was big and gangly and eventually tired of posing, clumsily flying away from me. And then I left the garden like a big sissy.

69/365 Summer's Over

They've all gone back to school. Fiona and Daisy are exhausted. I can see some of that in the other kids' faces. And summer 2010 draws to a close as we look forward to a weekend of back to school picnics and one last hurrah in the park: the International Festival.

I put the chalk up--not down in the basement like I will after the first frost, but in the closet in the front hall. The bikes still come out, but the jump rope has been hanging on a hook in the hall for two weeks. The pool is drained and is on its way to the alley for the next bulk pick up day. The galvanized steel won't make it another winter. We're going to regroup come the spring and try something new. I tore out the cucumbers and am not very hopeful that the tomatoes will ever produce. The morning glories and other crazier weeds got yanked off the fence and parking pad and stuffed into the yard waste dumpster.

I made a peach cobbler. That sounds like summer, maybe, but the strawberries are done, the blueberries are done, the blackberries are done, and we're in this thin slice of time between berries and apples.

I also got my first butternut squash through the CSA. I crock-pot cooked it overnight and scraped it into the food processor this morning. It's in the freezer now awaiting friends to turn into a massive pumpkin pie baking session sometime only too soon. Fiona scrunches her nose up but then remembers that pie is always optional, in a way that cubed squash baked with onions and beets or something terrifying like that is not.

The screened in porch is done except for painting the floor--that's this week's job. And then nights of breeze and increasing numbers of blankets and sleep-through-the-nights for Billy.

I had my coffee over ice today, and I will through the week (highs in the high 80s), but I bet it'll be back to coffee cups in September.

Bookbags and lunch boxes and "closed toe" shoes fill my hallway. I'm happy. I love the turn of the seasons, the tired old lazy summer giving way to crisp regimented autumn. Ah.

68/365 There I Fixed It

Jake fixed the porch last week. The railing was falling apart at the bottom. So he took a "spare" baluster (actually, it fell off one of the step railings, but was so close to the newel post we don't miss it) and wedged it underneath. There, he fixed it.

67/365 Brick Curve

One of the things about living in an older city, but not too old, is that decorative brick is commonplace. Even old warehouses in St. Louis are decorated. It was assembly line, I've read. Everything was modular, just like in new housing developments these days. But the materials were built to last longer, of course. I have this curve above my living room window:
Otherwise, my house is very plain, with tightly fitted red brick in plain courses. Other houses on the street have little flourishes like this, although none just like this. All our house plans are nearly identical, but not quite, and the fronts of our houses are identical, but not quite. It's easy on the eyes.

66/365 Across the street

On the other side of the block (without a porch photo this time), it starts at the top with Crazy Tony's empty shell of a failed rehab project, and then sort of a blur--I know the folks, but for the most part they're not appearing in this blog. The dentist is up there, the crabby Dehny couple; Vic and Wendy. Getting to the middle of the block, the Lohnes, Farottas, Leavins. Right across the street the Friedman family doesn't live there anymore. Then you have Kenneth's house, maybe rented, maybe sold. Rick after that, in the Wyman's old place, and then Henry and Viv all moved back in. Maguires, Brenda, and the Sudlanders.

65/365 Down the Way

Big Ed next door; The Paxtons with their wrought iron and chairs; Stricklands behind the dogwood; after them the McAllisters. And again, you can't see it, but Frank and Christy are next, and then the doctor we never see, the fireman and his family that, ditto, we never see, and the block ends with the drug house-turned-condos.

64/365 Up the Way

From my porch, looking east: The Navarros; Gilbert's house; the house that used to have all the German Shepherds but now is a single guy whose name escapes me and he's trying to rent out downstairs; the Sullivans.

Then there's that big holly tree. On the other side of that are three more houses, all 2-family flats, huge. Two are owner-occupied and one is always rented to long-term students, like medical students at the university down the way. Grumpy Mrs. Dehny always calls them "the renters."