In this first article, there isn't much for a person to do directly, other than continue to work on providing insect habitat wherever feasible. I'm mostly just sharing this because Dan Janzen is one of the scientists I really look up to, particularly because of his long-term commitment to the places where he has been studying insects for decades. So I'm glad he has a voice in this piece, even if the overall news just echoes what we've heard before about global insect declines.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/03/climate-species-collapse-ecology-insects-nature-reserves-aoe

We are once again experiencing some wildfire smoke from Canada, although the particulates haven't yet *quite* reached even the "unhealthy for sensitive groups" category. I still noticed the effects on my commute to work. So it's a good idea to understand the consequences of inhaling wildfire smoke, and to appreciate the need to try and reduce one's exposure whenever practical.

https://theconversation.com/wildfire-smoke-can-make-your-outdoor-workout-hazardous-to-your-health-an-exercise-scientist-explains-how-to-gauge-the-risk-255812

I thought the comment towards the end about exercising later in the day was interesting. In Arizona, the early evening often felt like the worst time of day to exercise, in terms of air pollution exposure. So I'd take that particular suggestion with a grain of salt.

I was pleased to encounter this third article, about research on how climate change might impact the nutritional value of food:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/07/250709091658.htm

This summer I worked with my students to think about how to make our ant head research relatable to other people. The simplest way is to present our work in the context of thinking about the nutritional value of crops we grow, and how that might affect our own growth and health. So it's helpful to have other research to point to in this regard, although the above article references work that isn't published yet, to my knowledge.

Yesterday was largely a day of satisfying things.

S was able to make plans to go sailing with P. This was kind of a big undertaking, because this trailer needed to have some work done on it, plus the boat needed a good cleaning, plus the schedules and weather had to align.

Towing the O'Day with Big Red seemed to go okay. S came home very tired and sunburned, but it seems he and P had a great time. On his behalf, I am very satisfied, because I know just how hard it has been to orchestrate this expedition!


Originally, I was going to accompany S to help with rigging and launching the O'Day, so I got most of my weekly chores done Saturday afternoon so I'd have a window of time to help out early Sunday morning. But as it all turned out, my usual weekly Scrabble game time wound up interfering with that plan, and S pivoted to launching from Henry Hudson Park anyway, so I found myself with some extra time Sunday morning.

That meant I had time to punch some ducks!




I've been out of ducks to give for a while. I'm pleased to have some again. Yes, I make that joke every time.

Since I had vacuumed on Saturday, that also meant that I could do some mopping on Sunday, while S was out of the house. It's easiest to mop when I'm home alone, because if both of us are around someone inevitably needs to walk through the kitchen in the midst of the mopping. The mopping was badly needed, is all I can tell you. I even managed to get some wood floor polish applied to part of the dining room floor, and now that part looks so good! And I even wiped down the basement steps! So satisfying. There was also a half-assed effort to clean some windows and mirrors in there, somewhere. Better than they were before.

For the afternoon, I headed down to the boathouse to try and tackle at least a couple of the things on the long boathouse project list.

I spent some quality time with some of the club's singles, mostly just trying to get a sense of their condition and what repairs they might need. This is partly in the interest of building a list of parts to order so we aren't just doing one-off emergency orders.

As part of that, I tracked down the riggers and seats for a boat that has been on loan to the club:



It is very satisfying to get all of the club's equipment better situated. I do enjoy finding and organizing things.

I also spent a few more minutes in the shipping container filled with supplies and tools:


There's still work to do to get this space better organized, but in this case I put some storage boxes away, and then got a small donated shelf moved into a spot where I could start putting painting, cleaning, lubricating, and finishing supplies on it:



You can see on the lower right that after a certain point I stopped trying to put every single can of spraypaint onto the shelf. But it is so helpful to finally be able to see what's here, most especially so we can get rid of the stuff we don't need, like the 800 different kinds of wood stains, and the chalkboard paint. And now I have a better sense of what things I might want to get so we have more of the stuff we actually need and use.

After that, I moved to the shed to inventory some regatta supplies. Here I am partway through the project of putting all of the regatta bow number cards in numerical order:



You can see from this picture that we have lost some of the bow number cards over the years, and that people have industriously made replacements in at least some cases. Many of the replacement cards are terrible, however, and there are even more numbers that have gone missing in recent years. But it was very satisfying to get what's here into numerical order. I then did a voice recording inventory so I now know exactly what needs to be replaced and can get the replacements ordered in a timely fashion.

And really, these are all excellent projects to have undertaken, in the name of getting ready to roll my sleeves back up to work on manuscript-writing, the highest priority work project for July.

First off, some photographic evidence of cherry picking and meeting mallorys_camera!

I didn't realize, until I arrived at Samascott, that you can also rent out Surreys there. This gives me lots of Ideas for future visits.



When I paid the picking entry fee and the person working there handed me the list of what's available, I was dismayed to see that cherries had been scratched off the list! After asking her about that, the person working there said, "They're pretty much gone but you can try and pick whatever you can get."

I found a couple rows of sour cherries, and this is what many of the trees looked like:



If you look closely, you'll notice there are lots of beautiful red cherries towards the top of the tree, and basically none lower down. It looks like people went for all the easy pickins, probably over the Fourth of July weekend, leaving only the fruit towards the top. Well, dear readers, it was a good day to be a fairly tall person. And also a person willing to walk towards the end of the row.

I did try going up a ladder once, although it wasn't positioned especially well and my feet informed me that I was definitely NOT wearing shoes with metal shanks in them.



On the other hand, I was wearing a brand-new leafcutter ant dress, and it was an excellent choice of apparel for cherry-picking on a warm summer day. (though I hesitate to recommend this particular dress to others because some of the stitching was very poorly done and I'll have to resew parts of it momentarily).

It saddened me to see that there are a lot of people who don't seem to fully grasp the concept of u-pick produce.



But at least we could console ourselves with ice cream. As you can see from this photo, both P and I have impeccable taste when it comes to outfits for cherry picking and/or gardening.



After returning home, what to do with all the fruit?? I managed to pick nearly 17 pounds of sour cherries, mostly without the stems, so processing needed to commence immediately.

But also, it was Hot, hotter still because S was doing some cooking in the kitchen.

So after washing a bunch of the cherries, I retreated to the basement to pit them.



Here is what 16 pounds' worth of cherry pits looks like:


Not pictured: the amount of cherry juice all over my legs and on the floor where I worked.

I saved the final pound for making some Luxardo maraschino cherries.



The making of the Luxardo maraschino cherries was highly satisfying on multiple different fronts, all at once.

The first front is that I never, ever intended to buy a bottle of Luxardo in the first place! I had gone to a liquor store at some point, in search of decent kirschwasser, and the person working there pointed me at the Luxardo instead. I figured I'd take the gamble, and, dear reader, I very much lost. Luxardo is very much NOT kirsch. Good kirsch is very hard to find. Frankly, I find the Luxardo horrifyingly sweet. So, not only is is NOT kirsch, it is impossible to use in any sort of large quantity.

Except if one is making Luxardo maraschino cherries, which are cloyingly sweet by design.



With this batch, I was able to finish off that damn bottle of Luxardo, for once and for all.

The second satisfying element is that Luxardo maraschino cherries call for a stick of cinnamon, and I have some top-notch cinnamon sticks from my Sri Lankan rowing teammate (who also points out that much of what gets sold as cinnamon, isn't actually cinnamon). One went in and it smelled fantastic.



The third satisfying element is that recently, a couple other rowing teammates were discussing how one teammate's significant other is exceptionally good at mixing up Old Fashioneds. When I asked him about why he thought his Old Fashioneds were particularly good, one of his comments was that he used Luxardo maraschino cherries in them, along with other fruits.

And so! One of the two jars I made will go to him, for feedback, and also because it's satisfying to give someone exactly the Right Thing. Especially when the Right Thing contains some of the liqueur I've been wanting to get rid of for ages. A very good use for some of these cherries!

By the way, here is the recipe I used for the Luxardo maraschino cherries:

-Combined 1/2 C sugar and 1/2 C water in a saucepan, along with a cinnamon stick and 1/4 tsp nutmeg. Bring to a simmer, then add 1 pound cherries and 1 C Luxardo. Simmer for 5 minutes, then allow to cool. Put in jars and store refrigerated.

Meanwhile, some other things done with the sour cherries:

Three gallon ziploc bags into the deep freeze. Naturally, S now says he would love a cherry pie. I might be inclined to wait before turning on the oven for that project. The cherries will keep in the deep freeze until the time is right.

Pitting the cherries released some extra juice, which I recaptured, because I've learned of another fine cocktail involving cherries, from annikusrex, originally with Maker's Mark, ginger ale, and sour cherry juice. My modified version uses whiskey (that's what's on hand), a dry ginger ale (lower sugar), and the extra cherry juices from the pitted cherries.



So refreshing!

I am also experimenting with homemade dried tart cherries. Here's how they're looking after ~18 hours in the dehydrator:



I'm really hoping the dried tart cherry experiment goes well. If it does, I could very well go back for even more sour cherries in a future year. Dried tart cherries go very well in muesli.

I finally got to meet mallorys_camera in person! In case you wondered, she is as lovely in person as you'd expect her to be. We met up to go cherry picking at an orchard in between where each of us lives. The easily picked cherries had all been pillaged, probably over the Fourth of July weekend, but we were still able to find plenty on the trees towards the back of the row. And I am 100% going back to Samascott Orchards in the future. Great spot.

For now, I need to go obtain more feeder crickets for all the campus animals. It never stops. And then I have a billion sour cherries to process. That's a great problem to have, really.

Raspberry season has arrived!





Time to stockpile more raspberries so we can make more of that delicious raspberry sorbet.

This garden bed is known as the BBQ Garden, because it originally looked like it used to be the site of a barbecue grill. Our lease explicitly says we can't have a barbecue grill, so instead we've got the BBQ Garden. A good, full-sun location:



The tomato, basil, and pepper plants in the BBQ Garden have really taken off over the past month, to the point where S figured we could roll up the chicken wire fences for the year. These tomato plants and the ones in the half wine barrel seem to be doing better compared to the tomato plants in the main garden bed.



Oh, here's what's at the other end of that rope:


In the meantime, the Dark Dahlia is getting big, and the lavender makes me happy every time I look at it.


And the porch herbs and smaller fig are pretty satisfying, too.


Overall I think we've reached a pretty good state with the garden and house plants. S would really love to take out all of the burning bushes on this property, which is understandable. But it isn't my top priority, because this is a rental house, and I've got too many other projects to work on in the meantime.