All this summer weather is just the bees' knees, isn't it? I don't know why that came to mind - possibly because I came across a notebook I started years ago that has all sorts of colloquialisms in it. I started collecting when I was in high school. I boarded one winter in Marshfield with an aunt and uncle, Warren and Wilimena (McAllan) Cole. Aunt Minn was teaching in Walden that year and every morning Uncle Warren would take us to school, dropping me off in Cabot and continuing on to drop Minn off at the Walden graded school. He returned home to mostly putter in his woodworking shop inback of the house he'd built next door to the church in Marshfield village, and then come to get us in the afternoon. He was a great story-teller, and his yarns were laced with colorful and whimsical expressions I'd never heard. I jotted them down in a little notebook I kept in my pocket. Trouble is, I don't have that notebook anymore. One weekend when I was at home, my mother ran it through the wash. I never did recover any of those. But apparently I started a new notebook many years later. I saw words like "balderdash" and "bunkum," "conniption," and "high-falutin," all words I grew up with. Sometimes I wonder what the origin of these words is, and somewhere I have a book about that. But I wouldn't even try to find the book these days - I'd just Google it.

I was mainly thinking about mosquitoes this morning. I had breakfast on the deck and it was very pleasant. Black fly season is apparently finally over with and the mosquitoes are definitely here for the duration. The other day when Bob visited, he decided to sit in a folding chair by the walkway to the deck and Fred and I were seated on the deck. Bob was almost immediately plagued by mosquitoes, while we weren't bothered at all. So I Googled that - and not surprisingly, there was a lot of information. Some people thought being off the ground six feet or more was the key - mosquitoes (females) are looking for warm blooded animals to feed off of and the theory was that that population thins out considerably above six feet, normally. Others disagreed saying it has to do with air circulation. Being a few feet off the ground gives better air and keeps them off target. So I didn't really get much satisfaction from my on-line search, but I'm very grateful that they apparently don't find us on the deck - at least for the time being. Perhaps there's a learning curve and the more we use the deck, the sooner they'll find us. In the meantime, it's very pleasant out there and we want to take full advantage. This nice weather isn't going to last forever.