Intermittent blogging ahead

I'll have to admit right now that I'm just not spending enough time by the computer, or even indoors, to do much blogging and I don't think that will change much in the next while, especially with Canada Day, two weddings, and the fair in our future. So you've been warned.

We've had hot, dry, sunny weather for the past week or so (and desperately in need of rain once again -- some of the grass is turning white and the leaves are starting to fall off the alfalfa, which needs cutting), and we've all been outside, tending the vegetable and flower gardens (finishing the radishes and starting in on the new spinach), admiring the new peony that burst into blossom, traipsing through the public cemetery for Tom's uncle's interment (which the minister kept referring to as an internment), buying and eating Fudgsicles, Creamsicles, and ice cream sandwiches, playing cowboys and Indians in the tall grass, hilling potatoes, reading under the rhubarb, weeding half of our baby trees (that would be about 700 saplings, in double rows, with hoes, the push rototiller, the rototiller attachment to the tractor, and by hand), watering same little trees, fashioning cages out of page wires to keep the deer from eating any more leaves off my Mother's Day apple trees (that was at 11 o'clock last night), eating watermelon with seeds, going to the homeschool end-of-year swim party, playing softball, attending the annual neighbors' picnic at a friends' farm, discovering a killdeer nest in the middle of our smallest nest and making a ring of rocks around it to make sure no-one drives over it, and trying to figure out how to move the nest that a determined but misguided bluebird built in the swather tube.

Far down inside the six-foot long swather tube. What made Tom think to look inside the tube yesterday before hitching the swather to the tractor is a mystery, but when he looked, there she was, sitting on her nest. One small egg was out of the nest, so she must have thought something was wrong with it and kicked it out. We can get Laura or Davy to reach in and rescue the egg (the perfect addition to our home nature museum) but the nest is beyond the reach of even a long, skinny, young arm. Tom is thinking of fashioning a sort of "pizza peel" to slide the nest out, and is also trying to find something a similar shape to the swather tube -- four inches in diameter, square -- in which to relocate the nest. And then the haying can start.