Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Olympic Rant.

7-31-12 VERMONT: We came back up on Monday, leaving 0.8 inches of rain over the past few days there, and finding a whopping 3.20 inches in the gauge here—almost an inch a day while we were gone. The trip up was uneventful.

Lily was here visiting on another day off, and Clara and Eliza joined us to watch Olympic action. There was another judging controvercy—I maintain that the winner of any event should be determined by the most points, fastest time, longest distance and not by form or style that relies on judges to pick a winner. Fans of diving, dancing, gymnastics, etc, disagree. I don’t dispute the athleticism of those events, just the scoring systems that require experts, who have repeatedly been shown to allow personal bias or chauvinism to affect their judging. The secrecy and the complexity of the judging process and of the ruling systems that leave the casual viewer shut out of the decision are also regrettable. Baseball stats are based on performance but not style.

The robins are finally done with the nest by the mudroom door, so I performed major pruning on the Mohican viburnum near that door, the shrub had taken over the whole space, and should have been pruned in the spring, but I had deferred to the birds. The rose bush that was knocked over by the severe wind storm died, and I cut it down as well. I also deadheaded delphinium and foxglove and weeded a bit. The corn and tomatoes are ripening nicely.

New blooms: echinacea, Indian pipe, red lobelia, common mint, Queen Anne’s lace.


Another hybrid daylily, one of the new ones.

And another one, this one is a double, twelve petals instead of the usual six.

Goose-neck loosestrife-I can see a goose's head there.

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