Tape

When I am finished at the U later today, I am going to my friend's home to help his wife with the final taping and adhering of photos to the various memory boards she wants to have at his funeral.  Even though I want to help her with this important memorial, I do also know that I will be extremely emotionally drained afterwards.  I have felt this emotional draining pretty much the last several days as I have been helping her with several different items.  The funeral/memorial is only a few days away.  

I am feeling considerable guilt about not seeing my other friend who was hospitalized and is now in a convalescence center.  I have not gone to visit him for two weeks since the other friend passed away.  I should be better than I am.

I set my alarm ahead earlier to try to squeeze a bit more time into the day, because I am feeling I am losing my grip on trying to stay on top of things that need to be done.  I hit the trail for my run at 4:25am which helped.  By the time I finished my 10.3 miles (~16.6km) it was just starting to have daybreak.  

Three straight hours of "BIG VOICE" professorial lecturing in a large lecture hall through a mask has wiped me out today.  I need to try again to force the issue about using a wireless microphone. 

The garden is winding down for the season.  The acorn squash are a big disappointment.  Last year, we harvested around 30 or so.  This year, with the same number of plants, we only garnered two..... total.  However, our butternut squash did quite well.  We have roughly 25 good sized butternut squash.  Our zucchini grew beyond all expectation again, and we have a truly shocking number of pounds.  The harvest of tomatillos was down a little bit, but still good.  We had one excellent batch of roma tomatoes.... but the rest were lost (likely the tomatillos as well) due to a torrential downpour we had in late July that dumped several inches of water on the garden in a short hour-or-so span.  The downpour also diminished the robust growth of the chard as well.  The herbs and cabbage and peas seem pretty average in terms of harvest.  

I have been thinking about my pipes a lot.  With the work in the garden, I also have been thinking about the couple of years when I tried to convince my father-in-law that we should try to grow pipe tobacco.  For a lot of years, my father-in-law had a huge home garden of somewhere around I estimate to have been 150 ft by 50 ft.  He never really wanted to do it, because he thought it would not really grow in our climate.  It would have been something fun, however. But, that ship has sailed.

After getting out of my "BIG LECTURE" I realized the U was sponsoring a free food event for students to celebrate the early part of the semester.  Happily, there was a food vendor on my path across campus to my office, who was selling snow cones.  I can never pass up an opportunity for a snow cone.  And, the nicest part was that he had the not-so-common anymore.... traditional lime syrup... which is always my favorite.  It only cost us “profs” three bucks…… well worth it, however.  

PipeTobacco