Smoke and birthdays.

Today is Eleanor's half-birthday, which we celebrate because her real birthday is so close to Christmas and gets overwhelmed, and also because we are CELEBRATORY FIENDS AND CANNOT BE STOPPED, and we had PLANS and were going to do THINGS but the city is trapped under a blanket of smoke from the nearby forest fires and we cannot go outside for more than, like, half an hour at a time. Everything is dim. It is, to be honest, sucking my will to live.

THAT IS AT LIKE 11AM. Smoke as far as the eye can see. So we just walked down to the coffee shop and I let Eleanor pick out a treat

and then we went to the library for story time because Tuesdays be Tuesdaying.

I let her pick supper (banana spinach pancakes? Which is not a thing we have ever eaten before so she is obviously just pulling foods that she likes out of the air and putting them together) and help me make them and then I read her a chapter from The Wind in the Willows because I figure three-and-a-half is old enough to start chapter books.

We have been leaving the house every damn day after naps except the last two days and I have totally lost the knack of amusing my children indoors. WHAT DO THEY DO I DON'T EVEN KNOW. Summer just started and I want to be outside and I know that my house isn't on fire and I'm not being displaced from my home but this whole situation is BUMMING ME OUT.

You know what's NOT bumming me out? MY GARDEN. Ye gads, I am going to have one million tomatoes ripening all of a sudden.

Tomato Row is embarrassingly opulent. And remember these tiny corns?

I mean.

And today I noticed actual teensy cucumbers growing on my cucumber plants, the ones that I overhauled and didn't think were going to grow. WE ARE GOING TO HAVE CUCUMBERS.

So many things pending, but I put covers over the strawberries and since then, we've gotten like five. The crows were eating them, those jackasses. Yesterday, I looked out the window to see two crows land in Melon World, stomp on every plant, take a bite out of my pumpkin leaves, TAKE A DUMP IN THE CORNER, and then fly off. I just.

The peas are coming in, and Joel keeps eating them before they are ripe. They're like the veal of peas, he says. Stop eating the veal of peas, I say, or we're never going to have the peas of peas. Today we harvested SIX PODS of actual, full-grown peas.

We are too excited to even make anything of them, we just eat them straight, and immediately.

Hopefully by tomorrow, the Smoke Monster (which currently stretches as far as Tennessee) has cleared up enough for some outdoorsing. I won't even care about the sinkhole halfway down our street.