stunningflowermachine

Someone has left a broken recliner at the kerb. It's been a while since I saw actual broken—dumped—stuff as opposed to stuff plainly intended to be taken by someone who could use (or sell) it, often with a FREE sign attached. The city used to have twice a year "put out anything" trash days, and people would gleefully grab what they wanted, including the resellers with their trucks. Then it was over with, and there would be almost no bulky stuff on kerbs for 6 months. But they cancelled that.

I took a walk at the end of a hot afternoon. A small schoolbus passed by, adapted into an icecream van: a few stickers added to the big STOP! signs, and the SCHOOL BUS lettering on the back changed to KOOL BUS. It was coming from the park, where it had probably made the circuit of the houses that face it, where there are a lot of families with kids. (In the park is the territory of the guys pushing carts with Mexican ices.) Around the corner from the tent under the road bridge—which is still there—a youngish guy was lying athwart the sidewalk/pavement, in the shade of the young maple trees ringing the carpark. He had a backpack and what looked like a coffee, was clean-shaven and not overly skinny, so I let him be. I felt bad about it, especially since the cops here are also firefighters and EMTs, but of course there wasn't a police or firefighting vehicle passing by, and he and his belongings looked arranged and not collapsed.

I turned the hose on that sector of the back garden in the morning, after breakfast. It was already hot enough that I had to run the water a bit before it got cold.

I went by the House of 5 Lions and there were two longhaired cats lying under the truck in the driveway: the calico and a ginger.

Hotter today. Since again disturbing Prudence at breakfast time, I haven't caught sight of a cat. Maybe the other people have an air-conditioned kitty lair.

One of my amaryllises has extruded a bud from the leaf litter.

Prudence was on the cat bed at breakfast time, and Monty appeared in the evening as I finished watering in back, and allowed me to give him a dish of food.

I filled up the greenwaste bin doing some pruning in front. This entailed going up the driveway with branches and bagsful of smaller debris, including sweepings from the pavement/sidewalk. Soon after I started, the housemate came out to pump up a tyre that has a slow leak and then to make a supermarket run because the glop with which she adulterates her coffee had gone off. Poor Mama Violet was caught between us. She kept emerging, fleeing, finding some other horrid human task going on at the other end of the driveway, and fleeing again. She stalked across the street at one point but came back quite soon; the house is to let and I think the fence hole or shed entrance or whatever it was she used over there has been closed up. She hissed at me several times. But she survived; when I came out again in the evening with the dog in tow, she whisked behind the compost bins.

And now I have itchy scratches on my arms and itchy bites on my hands.

All the peaches are ripening. It's a race between the trees and the rats and squirrels gnawing them off while still mostly green.

Also, the oaks are dropping little acorns, gearing up for the big acorn drop.