I'm tired a lot lately. An hour ago, I was reading on the couch and I could not keep my eyes open any longer (I was reading the Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers. I know it's not big on plot, but still...). So I took out my contacts, feeling too tired to even walk the 5 meters to the bathroom, and plunked them on the coffee table. I didn't really think that one through - when I woke up again, they'd of course shellacked themselves to the table. Crap. Right now, the two little discs are soaking in little pools of lens solution. Somehow, I think I'll be opening a new package of lenses tomorrow morning.
Last night, I had a friend over for dinner. And he's cool and he's interesting and his conversational skills leave the Peterson Field Guide in the dust, and yet, just after 10, I fell asleep while talking to him. How embarrassing. Worst host ever, that's me.
On the weekend, I was watching a sunset on Georgian Bay. The moment the sun was down, all I could think about was crawling into my sleeping bag. I didn't resist.
Other than going to bed ridiculously early, though, I've made the most out of the last few weeks. First it got ridiculously hot. So the weekend that started, I bugged Lorenz for the keys to his condo and headed up there with Eliezer, Marga and baby Avril, who were visiting from Venezuela. That was nice. On Sunday, I went for a quick paddle with Hart and Ray out of the private little marina at Ray's condo development. Then, I played in Toronto traffic for hours, taking my friends back into the city. That was not fun. That's when I knew it was truly summer, by the gridlock on a Sunday afternoon. It took 90 minutes from 400/401 to St. Clair/Mt. Pleasant. And after that, I still had to get *out* of the city.
It does not help that the air conditioning in my car has deserted me. It works, I think - but it does very very strange things to how the engine behaves. Thus, I won't use it. And I am balking at taking it in for service - for starters, that will probably be expensive. Also, I used to rant that air conditioning was for weenies, and I'm always bitching about how unnecessarily spoiled we are. So I thought I'd try a summer without. We'll see how long that lasts. Besides, I broke the antenna loading a boat onto my car, so I need to go to the dealer and get a new one anyway... because while I can deal with sweating on some days, I am not at all happy about no CBC on my way to work.
The heat lasted almost a week. I was thrilled with the thunderstorms and buckets of rain when it ended. I celebrated my excitement by having a nap, I think. My garden needed the rain. I am also being a bit ornery about the garden - even though I relent a bit with transplants, I am anti-watering. This, though, has more to do with laziness and no convenient water source in the garden than it does with my stated conviction of seeing which plants are suited to my microclimate without babying. The crabapple tree, two years after being brutalized by an inexpert pruning job, is sick. The rabbits ate most of my petunias and are starting on the 
impatiens. There are rogue morning glories all over the place, and my musical chairs for perennials game this spring has had surprisingly positive results for the coral bells (flowering for the first time this year, despite not being watered since the transplant operation). The honeysuckle is dead, I think. I'd spend more time in the garden if the mosquitos weren't as vicious as they are this year. I've been eyeing a "mosquito vacuum" on the Canadian Tire website. I won't go there, but that I even looked up such new-fangled biting insect destroying devices says something... (I have not yet advanced bast soundly slapping my limbs as they are contemplated for their snack potential). If I had a bug vacuum, I could buy a hammock and nap in the garden.
For what it's worth, though, I'm getting up at sunrise. I have Kicking Horse Kick-Ass Coffee, which is bloody expensive but a great reason to get out of the bed in the morning. I'm playing with a different camera for fun (see, for instance, the detail on my flowering onion above). I watched Eliezer's documentaries on his work in Venezuela and want to do something similar at my work - and today we got in the digital DVD recorder. I would have played with it, but I wanted to have a nap. I had a stunningly beautiful paddling weekend courtesy of Rob's annual flowerpottering and orchid hunting trip. I've got two expedition type kayak trips planned, both of which I'm rather excited about. I get to see my sister in a few weeks. The visit coincides with the week we both turn older. I will be 35. I'm trying to remember to upload some high res versions of pictures for a magazine tomorrow. I keep meaning to rewrite the template for my archive pages to include comments - I like the comments, and I save them all. But when the spambots first started attacking my pages, I felt I couldn't check on them every day and at least the old ones that had hundreds of spam wouldn't show. Now, I've monkeyed with the file names, and that's taking care of almost all of that, but I'm too tired to fix so the old comments appear. The thought of installing a newer version of MT which is compatible with human-verification modules makes me contemplate falling into such a deep and dreamless sleep that I'd better not go there.
And in the last week of this month, I defend a ph.d. thesis. I think we've finally come to the reason why I'm so tired all the time these days. And my next blog entry will have pictures of kayaks and sunsets and wild orchids, and it won't sound like I'm about to fall asleep. Which is what I'm going to do just as soon as I check on those contact lenses in their puddles.