Feeling the Heat

Summer is well and truly here, folks.  The highs have been in the 90's for the last several days and the humidity is just stupidly high.  Still, I can't seem to wipe this smile off my face.

*sigh*

Why do I love this weather?  It's hot, it makes my t-shirt stick to my back and the mosquitoes.  Oh my God the mosquitoes.  They don't usually like me, but I figure this year there must be so many of them that they take whoever they can find.

Lucky me.

But it also makes my garden grow like mad.  With the rain we've had and then the sun we've had, things are getting rather jungle like in the south 40.

Me and the insanely huge honeysuckle.

But I've been feeling the heat in other ways as well.  Work is ramping up to get super busy pretty soon.  The projects at home have more or less been on hold since we got back from vacation almost a month ago.  I'm so far behind on things in my life that I've taken a week off next week just to try to catch up. Here are  some of the things that I've been missing lately:

I found this little dragonfly resting on an onion.  He was there most of the day.  I'm hoping I get a chance to rest a bit as well.

I'm rather proud of my marigolds this year.  Here we find the French Dwarf marigolds in my backyard.  I like to plant marigolds in amongst my vegetable plants.  I hear they repel harmful insects.

This is a tiny hosta called 'Mouse Ears.'  I planted it near the new hardy kiwi plants in the 'wishing well' planter in the backyard.  They truly are tiny.  This plant is no more than 6 inches tall including the flowers.

I have developed quite a liking for clematis.  This purple one, the name of which escapes me at the moment, is gracing the new fence that my hubby built on the west side of the property.  Since I took this picture, I have added three others to this section of fence.  One is white and the other two are also different shades of purple.  They were supposed to be pink.  Dangit.  We still have a Sweet Autumn Clematis waiting impatiently in its pot for the fence on which it will grow to be built.  It is growing like mad in that little pot.

This little stunner is a gourd flower.  For some reason all of my gourd flowers are white this year.  The gourds I grew last year all had yellow flowers.  So, I turned to my little friend, Google.  Turns out that there are two different gourd genuses (genii?) one of which has yellow flowers and the other has white.  The ones with yellow flowers are all related to squash and melons which also have yellow flowers.  I have somehow managed to grow all of one genus last year and all of the other this year.  What a coincidence!