Dog Battles and Hot Plants

I still haven't told friends and family about my blog. I don't know why. Is it normal to blog in secret?

It's supposed to be 100 degrees today. That's very hot! We won't be doing much of anything; swim practice, gym, maybe the library, probably the pool later this afternoon... Pretty mundane day ahead of us. We'll be working with the dog, trying to get him to stop attacking his food, causing it to spill all over the floor. For some reason, this makes my husband crazy. Oh well. He has a right to walk in the kitchen without crunching tiny puppy kibbles.

I have to remember to water the plants on these hot days. My tomatoes are starting to come in. I'm very excited about this. It's been a couple years since we've grown tomatoes. It looks like we'll be hauling in a bumper crop, too. Before my neighbors moved a year and a half ago, we joked about growing complimentary "crops" in our patio planters. I even promised to keep hers watered if she would just get them in the dirt. Then her local job was eliminated and she decided to stay with the same company and move to North Carolina. Now I have no complimentary crops. I have expanded my planter assortment to include garlic, basil, chives and eucalyptus. The chives and eucalyptus were mainly placed to keep deer from the tomatoes. I've used the chives and basil a couple times. I'll start surfing the web in the next few weeks to see how I can "harvest" my eucalyptus and make use of it. It's not terribly aromatic. Maybe it's some weird variety that isn't as fragrant. Oh well.

The siblings get here late on Thursday. I have mixed feelings about the visit. My mother is increasingly hostile to me. Every time I call her and ask her what she's been doing, I get responses like, "Well you told me not to call you." I did tell her not to call 4 and 5 times a day but in her mind, I am the personification of evil and everything I say is twisted into a vicious statement. I understand that she thinks she's perfectly capable of staying independent but I don't think she is. I was reading about normal pressure hydrocephalus yesterday and she is more at risk for falls because of the illness's effect on a person's gait. Her gait is exactly as described on the Neurology Today website, wide-based, short, slow and shuffling. I guess this is like any other situation where someone is having difficulty accepting the problems in their life. She may just have to hit the bottom before she realizes she needs help.