What a fantabulous day. Get this: it was perfectly sunny all day, but not blazing hot even in the sun.
We walked to the farmer's market for tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches, plums, butter-and-sugar corn, and two pounds of basil. Our own tomatoes and cucumbers will be ready soon but not our nectarines or plums. (If you guessed a rodent with tentacles and a tail, yep.)
Then I inaugurated the new food processor: basil + piñon + romano cheese + elephant garlic (milder) + olive oil + salt = a couple of ice cube trays lined with plastic wrap filled with pesto, now in the freezer ready to stave off the bleakness of winter basillessness.
New food processor! New food processor! New food processor! Cuisinart, quite strong motor, two work bowls, three blades. The last one died in May as it struggled with perhaps too much pasta dough. I discovered in the meantime that pesto tastes much better when made with a mortar and pestle, but basil in bulk is available now and pesto in bulk is nothing I want to prepare without electricity. Plus the mortar holds less than a pint. So.
After that--which process spared me yet another opportunity to learn to change my bike tires, hooray!--we set up the new tent, which is snazzy although less exciting than the new food processor, not needing repetition, because it will entail camping. It has a moonroof! It has a vestible without really a vestibule (you keep your muddy boots between the fly and the tent but don't have to turn a pretzel to exit the damn thing. Also you can unzip the doors--two, one for each occupant, hooray!--with one hand: they're curved instead of cornered. There's an attic (a little shelf made of screening) for glasses; luckily there're also a few pockets along the sides, since the attic obscures the moonroof. The fly can roll down in seconds if the weather turns (completely covering the moonroof). It sets up about as easily as the...whatever the people's name was...tents in The Hero and the Crown.
Then I weeded! in the middle of the afternoon! in the sun! without dying of sunstroke! I clipped out all the old raspberry canes because, who knew, a second crop is coming in. There is one little baby pumpkin coming along, so I removed the other blossoms. (Last year, the mystery plant that turned into a pumpkin was huge before it was orange. This year, it's wee but already yellowy-orange. I didn't mark which squash I planted where, so because of the color I wonder if this is the Casper variety I planted.) I snipped the cherry sproutlets, ripped out whatever it is that has dandelion leaves but also pokey little irritants, not quite thorns but bad enough, ripped out some maybe-mums that do way too well on way too little care to be anything but weeds and that were crowding the rosemary anyway.
Then I emptied the garage. Kind of. Its perimeter is lined with this and that, but its perimeter is what the masons need access to. Some stuff I brought inside, and I am sick of moving stuff from here to there, and other stuff I piled in the middle, which the mason said was fine. I got to throw out some crap, always a plus.
I was soaked in sweat by the end, because of work not because of sun.