Late Summer Garden

Today I had hoped to put up a picture of Mary playing guitar; she's doing a week of music camp and is learning (from real guitar players) how to play O Thou Fount of Every Blessing and Ode to Joy, and was practicing on the couch before I left for work.  Still being young enough to believe that her father still has some functional brain cells, she naively asked me for assistance, and being a complete guitar hack, all I could do was to show her how to bend her fingers into pretzels to form the chords for C, G, D, E and F.  (For some reason, she hasn't gotten to A and B yet, but she's only on her second day!)  Then she showed me how she has learned to play the songs note-by-note by placing her fingers on the appropriate frets and plucking with her little colored pick.

By the way, did you know I hold my pick wrong?  (Well, maybe she's not so naive after all...)

I'm torn between pride in the musical talents inherent in my youngest daughter, and wistfulness that she knows so much more about music theory than I do. As do all of my children.  And my wife.  Basically, I'm not only a guitar hack, I'm a music hack. But it's still fun to make music!  Just don't ask me to take the quiz.

Anyway, I had taken the picture this morning before I left for work, but when I got back home afterward and tried to copy it off the camera's flash drive, it got scrambled during the cut/paste process, and the computer couldn't read the new file.  (It was showing a file size of zero bytes).

Guess I'll have to try again tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I put up a picture of my most excellent tomato plants.  Now that the tortuous summer heat has dissipated somewhat, and we've had a few days of rain, both the grass and the tomatoes have gone all wicky-wonky with green-ness - a veritable explosion of natural beauty!  And there are little cherry tomatoes all over the place!  Which will soon turn bright red, at which point they'll hop off their little stems and into my salad bowl, and I'll be a happy man.

And since the grass was also doing so wonderfully, Adam cut the grass today with the net result that we were able to dump a huge load of grass cuttings into the compost.  We should have plenty of excellent soil by next springtime!