As the days pass by, each oddly similar to the other, I realized it had been a while since I posted. The anxiety that comes from social media feeds filled with COVID doom, continually exasperating political news, orange skies from the fires, and distressed friends struggling to breathe hovers near. I am finding some calm with a daily exercise practice and cutting down the booze consumption – which definitely increased around March for some weird reason. I struggle daily with the need to keep the family safe and a strong pull for social interaction, as I’m sure most of us do (minus the severe introverts).

That aside, life is still good. The weather has taken a turn for the sultry and we’re getting some afternoon thundershowers here and there offering up some gorgeous summer skies. Last night, we even had some big thunderstorms that made it to the ocean from the mountains and were treated to a light show over the ocean. No hurricanes on the forecast – likely due to the la niña, but who really knows with climate change? Do la niñas still really exist as we used to know them?

In other “news”, I harvested one of my banana bunches today.

You may remember I was unsure when to harvest and prematurely cut a hand off the top to see if it would ripen. It did, but took a fairly long time and it is now obvious that it was premature. The bananas in the lower part of the photo are those immature ones compared with the fatties above. I’m excited to taste them when they have had a bit of time to ripen. The immature ones were texturally creamy and dense and had a nice tart flavor, so I have high hopes for some deliciousness.

I’m going to end this post with a cute animal photo, because who doesn’t like those? We temporarily saved this little lady from a couple neighborhood dogs who had her cornered in a cactus. <3