As I walk my laps around the block in the morning, I count things. What lap I'm on (5 laps make 2 miles). How many bunnies I've seen (least: 5; most: 30). How many squirrels (record: 3). How many doves (record: also 3). Anything unusual (that one time I saw a pair of quail who quickly ducked into the brush). How many times I've heard that rooster off in the distance crow.
I count houses (25 in the tract). I count cars. I count who has a large outbuilding behind their house (5). I wonder, judgmental as all get out, how in a tract with two and three car garages, there are only three homes including us that don't have (usually multiple) cars left out in their driveways. It's not quite as bad as it was in Anaheim, where we quite literally had people think we weren't home because our cars were in the garage not the driveway, but still! I guess most people, even here, use their garages for storage and workshops, not car parking.
Squiddle starts school on Tuesday. We've got his desk and a side table set up in his bedroom, and we'll see how a more intensive schooling schedule over Zoom will go, compared to this last spring. We've been working with him on lessons most days over the summer - writing a sentence, doing some math or maps pages in his first grade workbook from Costco, going through a stack of vocabulary flashcards, reading books or pages from the workbook, and we're fairly sure he's ready. Well, save for maybe the reading comprehension... he's been having a bit of trouble with those workbook pages.
But since he's going to need at least light supervision, I'm going to need to be at home, even after Jazzy starts developmental preschool again (2 days a week) on the 21st. No more thrift stores for me for quite a while! So I went on a brief jaunt up to Port Orchard on Friday, as a last huzzah. I found nothing at St. Vincent de Paul, got only what was on my list at Joann Fabrics, but actually found some things at Goodwill: ten canning jars ($2), which I haven't seen at a thrift store in months, another mirror for my wall of mirrors ($1.40), four quilting stencils ($4), and a quilt top ($2).
Gardening-wise, my tomatoes are finally starting to come ripe! Yum-yum. I took half a dozen over to my parents' yesterday, along with a few zucchini and some of the radishes whose growth has been stunted due to living in the shade of the zucchini. As for the inevitable sneaky monster zucchini, the chickens have realized they're most tasty. So, win! And yesterday I also finally finished putting the weed-suppressant circles around the new fruit trees and blueberry plants, and weighting them down with a thick layer of mulch. Hooray for a slightly tidier garden!
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