So that's what we did this weekend. We saw and stayed with Nick and Bonnie at their place, getting miraculously lucky with NYC traffic and arriving in time for sangria and a nice evening. Saturday we saw the boats made of wood, old and new, and quite a bit of Nick's handywork on display in the museum's exhibits.

Saturday we visited Longwood Gardens down near Delaware. We wandered and took pictures and were amazed at the incredible lily pads which were shaped like tart pans. There was quinua salad at the picnic grounds and then tired bodies found AC and soft seats in the Vibe. We stopped by Longacre Dairy on the way home and kicked it at 5815 for the evening. Really, we kicked at 5815 on Sunday, too, with a trip out and about to see Allen and pick up a few exurban essentials. I talked with everybody who I'm related to that has a phone, the girls did lots of this and that, and before long it was time for bed.

Tonight I mowed the lawn - with a gas-powered mower borrowed from friends - for the first time. We don't have a big patch of lawn, but there is something inherently American Dreamy about pushing the mower up and down the yard. Then there's something very satisfying about looking down from the deck and admiring the lush green. After we returned the mower we stepped inside for a very impromptu barbecue gathering to help neighbors eat leftovers, then home for a few quiet hours before bed.

A few years ago the whole world discovered a hard cover book written by a man with a beard who put an annoying number of tangential details into his book which featured a heavily-Photoshopped image of our planet superimposed onto a quarter on the aforementioned hard cover. Mr. Thomas Friedman wrote "The World is Flat" and everyone seemed to cry "oh yes! have mercy! oh yes!" in agreement. However, a few months later he wrote an article condemning General Motors as a 'crack dealer' who pushed energy consumption as its lethal vice - and a conundrum was born. An article on the cover of Friday's Wall Street Journal described the fall of outsourcing at one Midwestern company, which brought production of its bulky product back to the Midwest from China. The world is getting rounder again.

To be fair, Mr. Friedman argued mostly about the globalization of knowledge industries, but he also assumed that, all things being equal, industry would flow to the lowest-cost areas. However, for any industry to flow anywhere there must be a massive consumption of energy to equip the new location and build connections (be they buried optical fiber or flying carbon fiber), and thus flattening is a crack dealer, too. I think we'll be back to an oblate spheroid in no time, with local industry - knowledge and otherwise - being critical to sustaining our very way of life.

This is what we'd imagine the loft could look like and it only took ~10 months to get it to this shape. We cleaned and broke down the old table/desk and took it downstairs and then enjoyed doing office-y things in this new space. (Some other night it will be fun to create a wire management solution.)

It was also Jenelle's last day with students, so we had a bit of celebratory dinner at local hotspot Gio, which is a place we hadn't visited but will return. Then, back on our own hotspot - the deck - we enjoyed a nightcap and square of dark chocolate as the sun set and June bugs came out to run the gauntlet between Ollie and Maya, who were hellbent on catching and eating(!) them.

The heat wave which made national news was a central part of our focus, too. It felt like August on Monday and Tuesday; Jenelle's A/C-less workplace rose to 'not fit for man nor beast' range during finals and at home we hunkered down indoors. Jenelle made a great cold salad for dinner tonight and we sat in the front room to read rather than braving the cloud room's sauna-like temps.

Today we didn't get much of a jump, but then had brunch at The Buckeye (a local tavern whose exposed timber and brick construction is charming enough to overcome the negative connotation that comes with its name) and talked about a lot of stuff both light and not. One of those topics was picking (y)our own strawberries, and we were so moved that we went home, changed, and headed down to Bucks county for some mid-afternoon sweaty backbreaking labor. Ahhh summer! Now we're at home again, there're strawberries flash freezing and piano music is making its way up to the loft.

Last night was approximately the halfway point of Jenelle's class but also the end of sports season until fall. It's over because the Red Wings clinched last night and, after a bunch of familiar faces skated the Cup on unfamiliar ice, hockey season is over. Now I'm left with EDSBS's countdown to college football kickoff.

This is Jenelle with the rhubarb strawberry custard meringue pie that she made with the rhubarb we bought at the Emmaus Farmer's Market which we visited after the ride to Topton that we went on after we watered the seed that we'd put on the lawn the day before. It was delicious.