Monday, July 8, 2013

Ungrateful Slugs























The warm sunshine today seems to have sped up ripening of berries and tomatoes!  I was excited to see a spot of deep orange when I glanced out at the patio tomato this morning.  I raced out to pick this first tomato of the season, only to discover I would have to share it with some slugs who had already been there.  Well, half a tomato is better than none, but I've lost my fragile sympathy for the drowning slugs.






















We spent much of the day dealing with the aftermath of the Great Damp.  Our internet connection vanished, and both AT&T (the land line provider) and Earthlink (the ISP) declined to accept responsibility for fixing it.  AT&T said since we used the land line mainly for DSL and our telephone was broken to begin with, they would assign responsibility to Earthlink.  Earthlink troubleshot and determined the problem was with the land line.  So Phil went out and bought a cheap phone and hooked it up and it still didn't work, thereby proving the problem was, indeed, with the land line.  But just before he called AT&T back, he remembered that the other day when he was de-ivying the back of our house he cut what he thought was a defunct phone cable.  Since he thought it was something installed by the previous owner and was no longer a live connection, he didn't bother to seal it off.

Drawing 130 shows the little culprit:  the wires were soaked during one of the many downpours over the last ten days, and I remembered that we DID have a live connection back in my studio, which I haven't used in the five years since I got a wireless computer and we moved the modem and router to the front of the house.  So P. dried out the wires and taped them up, and everything works fine now.

Drawing 128:  the first (albeit watery) ripe berries of the season

Drawing 129:  Late this afternoon the blue sky began to look ominous again from the view over the mountains

Drawing  131:  a little clay ocarina that sits on our back porch.

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