Can't Blame the Heat

This summer, we had a straight 90 days above 90 degrees with very, very minimal rain fall. Veggie gardens across the state felt the impact. Come late July - everything not already dead was rapidly dying. A break in the weather came a few weeks ago when we spent a good solid week in the 70-80 range. It was beatufiul. I took the opportunity to plant out my fall crops, noting only after the fact that I put the lettuce where the falling acorns destroyed them last time.

The acorns fell, the heat soared back into the 90's this week and they're gone now. Each lettuce plant, there were about 12 of them, is completely gone. Nope, can't blame the heat on this this one. The plants were completely uprooted and carried off by some unseen creature. I never have this problem with lettuce in the spring, but it seems like this happens each fall. Squirrels must be in prime harvest mode now and any and everything is fair game and yet it's funny to watch how I completely ignore the past and offer up the sacrificial seedlings over and over

A few weeks ago, Erin posted about a building set her son was working with. They boy here loves Legos and building sets so I emailed Erin to find out about them. She told me where to find them and also that, to paraphrase, it took her son a while to figure them out but once he did he was fine. This was apparently code. ;)

We found the sets and couldn't be more excited to learn they were on clearance for 50% off which meant we got the really large sets for about $2.50 each. You can't argue with that.
They're basically a wooden 3-D puzzle once you pop out all of the pieces and assemble them. I was working with the notion that the instructions were on the back of the cover sheet and that all would be well.

The back of the cover comes with a diagram of all of the pieces with random numbers and letters strewn everywhere. The instructions read: Get general idea of where each part goes by referring to the front photograph and the diagram below.

The boy read the instructions aloud to me, paused, looked at me, looked back at the paper and then said, "Well, that's just unreasonable."

After I looked it over some more I decided the key part of the instructions that was missing was that along with the glue and sandpaper you'd need a fifth of liquor. Really? The 'general idea'? As always with projects like this, I labored over the instructions and the boy went to play legos. An hour later, I had the body of the dragon done.
I'm thinking we should have started off with the fish. ;) That, was the code from Erin I should have deciphered sooner.

I just submitted my application for Keychains for a Cause to participate in Auburn, GA's Auburnfest October 15-16th. It's the largest festival we will have done yet and the organizer said that whereas they focus mostly on folk art, they like our concept and cause so much that they will allow us to participate. I couldn't be happier. We're also looking at doing some side fundraising for a charity 5K in the area and other school based fall festivals. I'm pretty excited, yet always just a little nervous as to how we'll do.

The morning comes early. Sweet gardening dreams.