I had several pounds of apricots from Andy’s Orchard and they needed to be used. It would be criminal to let any Anyas just sit there.

In this heat wave I ended up warming the pan for the air fryer function on my Breville microwave+, halving the apricots, tossing them with a couple of tablespoons of melted butter, single layer, and cooking them at 400 for seven minutes. Repeat with the rest. Didn’t add any sugar yet; I wasn’t sure how this was going to work out and I didn’t want to burn anything.

My gadget came with 400F as the preset and I have yet to figure out how to turn it down. Up, yes, down, no.

The result was revelatory. No apricot will ever go unused in my house again. I started out by making pumpkin almond muffins and substituting pureed apricots and adding almond extract. Might add a tablespoon or two of liquid next time, but those were good.

Or I could make a cookie crust base, add the apricots, sprinkle some streusel on top. I did put some in my oatmeal this morning.

They had started to get a little dried, as apricots do. They are entirely revived now and the flavor and texture are all you could hope for.

I have a pie’s worth in a ziplock. I just need to remember when I take it out of the freezer that they still do need that sugar.

They are! They’re actually eating the leaves. Goldfinches love sunflower leaves specifically and this site recommends planting them near your veggies as a decoy because you might as well make use of this, right?

They said it mostly happens in California. I have questions.

My phone could see the details my eyes no longer can, and upon embiggening that’s exactly what those two birds were.

But I like my sunflowers… So I took a bit of bright pinkish-red thick yarn and tied it around the upper stalk of the one they were going after the hardest.

It didn’t take long before I saw another one swooping in–and then whoawhoawhoa!!! it about did a backflip in the air trying not to continue in that direction. Close!

It went to ground. It started eating the weed seeds. The little tiny stabby ones that attack your socks and wedge themselves into the yarn and you can hardly see them but man can you feel them. Hey you guys! Eat those!

Next thing you know we had a small flock doing exactly that.

Postscript: Most cities around here canceled their fireworks, given the intense heatwave and the wildfires already going, but it turns out the ones closest to us were still on. They apparently were moved so as to be completely over the water, which means we could stand in our front yard and see almost everything. Well into it, the kids and mom across the street finally opened the door to ask questions; we called to them to come on over, our place was on enough of a rise that they would see a lot more from here.

They had lived all over the world and then here the past few years and the kids had questions about the Fourth of July. I couldn’t hear much over the booms but Richard gave them a bit of Fort McHenry history.

There was one again! Did you see the sunflower?! Oh that’s so cool!

And then yet another sunflower. YES.

And good memories were made for all.

Two volunteer sunflower plants, presumably with the same parent (I only grew one last year) but they did not come out the same variety at all. Cool.

I saw a small chickadee type landing on the multi-headed one this afternoon and I thought at first it was coming to inspect for seeds. Wrong plant, bird, you want the one over there, that’s where they’re starting to fill in.

But that’s not what it was after.

It carefully stabbed then shredded a leaf.

I hadn’t known I’d taken a before picture.

There are more sunflowers along the fence, and I actually planted those, and it bugged me yesterday when the leaves of the tallest were suddenly mostly gone. I blamed snails. And I had spent a lot of time hand-picking them out of my yard.

Side note: some idiot in the Gold Rush days thought he was going to make his particular fortune by selling escargot to the 49er types and imported French snails towards that end. When the business somehow did not take off among that segment of the American population, the snails were released around the river that runs by San Jose Airport. Where even the local wildlife mostly turned up their noses.

But this looked like what I’d just watched.

I found myself flashing back to my late neighbor proudly showing me their garden and the squash plant leaves that were totally shredded: birds had used them to build their nests and Jim loved that they’d contributed to the next generation.

I would never have known if not for that. Birds? Steal zucchini leaves? But of course it made sense.

And now here I was actually watching how it was done.

July 3 is awfully late for nest-building–but on the other hand, if a clutch fails, bereaved songbird parents will throw the year a do-over if the weather is good. Um. It hit 102F these past two days and I wouldn’t call that good for much, but I’ll let them do them.

I’m hoping that means that in another month I’ll get to see baby birds learning to fly all over again. It is always such a kick.

The San Jose peregrines: one sister did not survive fledging, the other three are doing fine.

There have never been all females before.

They are notably more social than past fledglings. They hang out. They have sleepovers–none of this snoozing on separate buildings nonsense.

They are so funny. They play mid-air. They hang around the home nest and runway instead of dispersing further and further away. They tease each other. They dance with their heads. They’ll repeatedly put out a foot to hold up a sibling: You didn’t say Simon Says! Or actually push her with it. And step on her tail if that didn’t get enough attention. Or pull on a feather. (28 seconds in) or (Mom! She’s not sharing!) reach between her sister’s feet to steal the prey. (2:40.)

From the cool of early morning, before it hit 102F in our town: Bouncy bouncy bounce! Skid! Bounce!

2.41 lbs.

These are getting to be a habit.

One of the things I like about the Fourth of July is that it’s celebrated on the actual Fourth of July.

Not when it would make a long weekend, much though that would be nice, but with a firm declaration that it’s not about having time off nor about the distractions of the day, it’s about our whole country celebrating together the actual privilege it is of having this democracy that belongs to all of us, every single person from every background and all of us in it together with every person’s vote of the same importance and impact as every other person’s vote.

My family can tell you that I have never been a puzzle person. Spectator sport. He loves them, though, and had a great time playing one with his sister when she was in town. I knitted and kept them company.

My friend Holly told me a few years ago about Nautilus wooden puzzles and they have some gorgeous ones; I bought him one for Christmas a year or two ago.

He never touched it.

Who did he think he was, me?

But puzzles are a collective endeavor, he explained.

Two weeks ago they sent me a sale teaser that had this Grand Canyon in it. 253 pieces. Surely even I could manage to put up with that, and our anniversary was coming right up and it seemed the thing.

It takes four hands to hold them together when you move a connected bunch to the edges that he insists must be done first.

I thought the number of pieces meant it was going to be simple. I loved that some of the puzzle pieces looked like wildlife. What I hadn’t thought of was how much my brain was going to resist putting a bear in upside down and stop picturing it as a bear. Or a condor. Or whatever.

It took the two of us two nights, and I was mentally apologizing to my granddaughter for the 25 piece one I sent her from them: puzzles may be her favorite thing and she may be really good at them but four years is just not old enough to handle those wooden parts that don’t click in place but keep sliding around and separating with any movement.

He found a little octopus puzzle he’d bought himself that had no outer edges, just freeform. I contributed a very little. That took him two nights to finish, which surprised us both. Okay, maybe I’m not so bad after all.

I found the older Nautilus. It’s a bay, underwater and overwater, gorgeous, and we started in on it tonight.

I was surprised at how much faster it was going than the canyon.

That’s because you’re better at it, he said.

I guess all I’d had to do all along was to want to try.

Enough already.

Got out the Sharpie.

So there.

Only took me 44 years to decide to do that.

44. 65. 66.

Also, another 2.2 lbs of sour cherries (I’m keeping a running tally for the year here where I know where it is) were picked, pitted, and this time baked and we did indeed celebrate.

 (That subject line was for my dad. He’d have loved it.)

Sink, bowl, plate, small bowl. Far right, right, middle, left. Faucet for occasionally washing leafy bits off.

Pick up a cherry, swivel it in your fingers to where you feel and see the belly button of the thing pointing towards the left. Gently squish the pit out and grab it with your left hand and into its bowl while dropping the fruit onto the plate with your right. Each hand going in its natural direction, thus less likely to mix up which goes where.

With the small soft tart cherries, doing it by hand is faster than dealing with the pitter and you know you’re not missing any stones.

When I was done I drained the pits and added their juice to the bag.

I’d always wanted to know what the weight ratio of pit to pulp was. So now I know: for my English Morellos, it was 2.29 lbs of fruit for today’s picking and .314 lbs of pits.

The chance of randomly landing that second number hints at a sense of humor of the Divine. Love it.

Okay, so, divide the one into the other and you get 7.3 times and it’s all good.

Don’t forget Thursday’s debate. Whatever one’s political affiliations, we’ll get to see the candidates as they actually are, not as presented by political hacks doing video slices-and-dices.

If I knew who this was for I’d have had the motivation to finish it days ago, but I made some good progress today.

And so it begins: the brief days that start with an hour of picking/pitting/bagging/labeling/freezing.

These ended up in the fridge all day, mmm, tart cherry pie, but I just couldn’t do it: we had been out of frozen ones and I needed that first bag ready against the winter to come, that sense of getting the work started. One to save, first.

Up to you, he said.

Freezer it is.

Besides, a few more days out there in the sun for the rest and then we will have the perfect reason for a little celebratory baking anyway.

As I flash back to the person who shook our hands in the receiving line in Maryland and told us, Congratulations. You guys picked the hottest day for this date on record.

(Suddenly wondering if that record held….)

I told a few people part of the story. Here’s the rest.

We got front seats on the plane ride home. Nice. But whatever plane model it was, they were the tightest seats we’ve flown.

My 6’8″er likes the aisle seat and I don’t generally have a problem with the middle but after trying it, man; I moved by the window.

But I felt doubtful about having put my knitting in between us (and rightfully so–I know how much tall people need that legroom.) I moved back to the middle a moment so I could lean over and ask and be able to hear the answer: “Is this a full flight?”

The tall African-American attendant had looked even before we sat down like her day had not been going well at all and that she was trying to do her job better than she at all felt like at that particular moment. My annoying seat-taking had clearly not helped. And she was right, a 5’5″er taking two tall seats is a jerk move, even if I was planning to move not only out of the way the second anyone asked for one, but into the hated middle.

She said it was. I stayed in that center seat, resigned to my fate.

What I didn’t hear was that the other flight attendant, a white guy on the short side, had gone, Whaaaat?! It is not!

There is no under-your-feet space there and the overhead bins at the front fill fast. You are limited in what you’re allowed to have on your lap.

I had a book and a small project in a ziplock that also had hand knit finger puppets, which I handed one-by-one to Richard who handed them to the parents of the four small children who came on. Have a great flight!

The attendants saw.

As boarding continued, I was looking for a tall person carrying nothing.

It was nearly over when I spotted the guy: he was an older black man, he was walking with some difficulty, and the backpack he had was being carried on his far arm where I didn’t see it.

Something joyful that I completely didn’t expect seized the moment and I called over, Would you like a seat?!

His face lit up. How had he lucked out like this. YES! I don’t know how to describe it other than it felt like, oh, we finally get to meet each other!

I think I surprised her. The attendant who’d lied to keep me from hogging the window readily helped him with his bag while he sat down, grateful to finally be off his feet.

There was so much love radiating from this good man, whoever he was. By way of conversation he asked if this was our first flight? It was his second.

His English was very good, but the accent and the… I didn’t quite catch which country he had been evacuated from and brought here but he was so grateful for the warm welcome.

I tried to knit but there was simply no space for my arms. I barely managed to hold up my book.

We were in the air now and it was loud and I was deaf. He had a smart phone. He didn’t know how to get it to do what he wanted from mid-flight, and the buckled-in attendants held out their hands for it and we passed it down to them and they connected it and found the movie he wanted to see and again it was a moment where we all came together for him. Welcome welcome welcome. From all of us to all of us and particularly to him.

He transformed our day. He transformed us.

A certain former reporter who is a private pilot mentioned in his Substack the case of the Southwest plane (NBC link) that went into a Dutch roll a few weeks ago, and explained how that had happened. He linked to a video (YouTube) of it actually happening to another flight years ago. Yow.

Which led to a brief exchange with him, because on one of our flights a week ago our Southwest plane suddenly dipped way down to the left and then immediately after, way down to the right. We were sitting at the front (the pilot in that first link said you would feel it at front and back but not so much in the middle) and all the passengers around us were looking at each other, like, What was THAT.

And then the plane seemed to straighten out and be okay.

I asked him, Do pilots always report those incidences? Are they required to?

His answer was, typically, no, unless they thought it had damaged the plane or was a sign of damage. But there are ways of anonymously reporting them, designed to protect those who do so. It is possible our case could have been turbulence–and it was possible we would hear more about it in the coming weeks.

Turns out not even Southwest knew about that recent case right away. But when they did they took it to Boeing and said This is your problem. This piece should never have had power mid-flight.

You know, there’s a reason I routinely say a prayer for the pilots and crew members before every flight. I don’t usually feel like it’s actually needed other than for my feeling like I’ve done my very small part towards a safe journey for all.

But I guess you never know.

With some fussing at myself over having put it off, I headed out the door to run to the pharmacy.

There was a Tesla at the vacant house next door. ? Wait. Had to be… And then the driver, instead of pulling out, got out.

And with that I met the real estate agent starting the prep to sell the place. I’d needed to meet her, she’d needed to meet me, and she happened to be leaving at the same moment I was so there we were.

I told her where the neighbors behind that house had left some damage to the fence during their construction. I told her about my difficulties in finding a surveyor so we can redo the part of the fence between us where it had been rerouted for the now-gone redwood, and we’d like to have that foot or so back; she could help me with that. She knew who to call. She was on it.

Such a nice person. We have each other’s name and number now and I look forward to meeting whoever the new neighbors will eventually be.