This is real life in Colorado. (found on Flickr)

All the Basic Books of Scientology have been revised to their original state: pure L Ron Hubbard with no editorial alterations. My summer project is to read them all by October and this is going to take some focus on my part.

It's been a summer for reading. I found Neil Gaiman and B Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" and Sweetie keeps placing his copy of "East of Eden" in my hands (it looks promising). Good thing we cut back on our cable service.

Jeez..I just realized I have to read Harry Potter, too......

Between books and dogs, nothing much else is gonna get done.

When I was growing up, friends and neighbors always brought us bags of tomatoes or corn or green beans or crowder peas. We would spent hours helping Mama peel or shuck or shell to stock up the freezer for winter. The fava beans from Cure Farm reminded me of her. We ended up with a double order since we traded those for our head lettuce. I took them out on the back porch to shell them in Mama's honor.
Yellow squash was another delicacy of hers, boiled with onions and smothered with butter. This dish is a variation on that theme: sauteed with a little basil.

My dogs have taken to herding me from time to time. We all go walking - those two, Sugar, and myself, everyday but occasionally I don't want to. After they've done their initial psychic-understanding "we-are-going-for-a-walk" dance, they start hedging me in in such a way that makes it difficult to walk unless I move the way they want me to go. That is toward the door.

It's very flattering.

I haven't noticed sunsets being any more spectacular than they normally are, but the morning sun comes in through an unusual yellow haze. Lots of wildfires going on in the west.

Interesting article from July '07 "Scientific American"

"To get a red sky, you need aerosols, explains A. R. Ravishankara, director of chemical sciences at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. Aerosols are solid or liquid particles suspended in the air that originate from both natural processes and human activity.

Natural aerosols come from forest fires, mineral dust kicked up by sandstorms, sea spray and volcanic eruptions, among other things. Volcanoes, which have produced some of the most spectacular sunsets in history, can inject sulfuric acid droplets into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere between 10 to 35 miles in altitude. These droplets can be swept across the globe, painting brilliant crimson twilights wherever they go. Following the 1883 eruption of Indonesia’s Krakatoa, brilliant sunsets appeared around the world, one of which is said to have inspired Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream."

Much of downtown Boulder has been replaced in recent years by new construction in the form of red brick buildings. Now we have a "financial district" where we once had a motley collection of older buildings and businesses. None of this has really bothered me but today, when I read that Lolita's Market may be replaced by a newer 'energy efficient' building, a little "aarrgh" welled up in my throat.

The building that is Lolita's dates back 130 years and has been a downtown market since 1979. The developers promise to keep the history alive with a photo essay to show everybody what once was there. Will that satisfy the basic need that people have for some sense of continuity? I don't think it will.

Last night we headed out for a walk with the dogs at the gloaming and noticed some wretched looking low clouds coming down from the north. Sugar paid them no mind since they were so far away so we did our loop and headed home at our leisure. A block out, I heard something that sounded like a pack of dogs trotting after us, their toenails scraping the pavement. Looking back, I only saw big huge raindrops heading south toward us like an invisible wall!

We made it back to the porch before it really started coming down and then enjoyed a good hour's worth of scary lightning with lots of thunder claps and ragged clouds, not to mention a great soaking rain.

"You just had to show reality who was boss, that was all."
Spider in Anansi Boys