I’m much happier in the sixties. I’m talking temperature not the decades, although that works, too! What a week — nationwide. I am very grateful to live near a large body of water. I can’t imagine being trapped in some sweltering river valley somewhere in the Midwest. Let’s not even talk about Texas.

I actually attended college for a couple of years in the Dallas-Denton-Fort Worth triangle. This was just after the Kennedy assassination. What a culture shock for a Yankee girl. At any rate we traveled a bit throughout the state. Talk about hot, dry, brown, and flat. The movie Giant comes to mind. I said I wasn’t going to talk Texas and here I am. At least I didn’t go off on a rant about Gov. Rick Perry.

A fine week in the plant world. I picked a half-bushel of Ronde-de-Nice zucchini. They are so perfectly round and are best at the size of tennis balls. Sadly, in keeping with sports references, mine are as big as soccer balls. They are still tender-skinned thanks to plenty of water. I have a new, improved method of processing them.

In the past I’ve blanched and frozen or sautéed and frozen. I have also shredded them, squeezed out the excess water, and frozen for use in quick breads.

The packages make their way to the bottom of the freezer for a few years and end up in the pig or chicken pen. Why I don’t feed the animals right away is beyond me.

This year I’m sautéing along with tons of garlic and/or onions (I have plenty), adding a splash of red cooking wine (thanks to Julia Child), and blending the mixture with the handheld blender into apurée.

I plan to use in soups and sauces without the unpleasant texture associated with frozen summer squash. A big plus will be paragraphs of column material this winter.

I cut an errant branch from a high bush blueberry. It was loaded with fruit. I used it in an interesting floral arrangement. As luck would have it the fruit began ripening. Violet and I have picked straight from a vase on the table. Finally, harvesting made easy!

I got some new baby hens in the beginning of March. They finally are beginning to lay. They produce the cutest tiny eggs at first, many of them with double yolks. The yolks aren’t much bigger than marbles.

I try to notice great combinations as I drive around. The house on the corner of Skiff avenue and Edgartown Road had a row of very blue hydrangeas with a border of hostas. The hostas bloomed a lighter purple. Very nice although short-lived, hosta flowers, hydrangeas with purple candle astilbes are also great.

My editor corrected me last week. I made reference to tribal women with rings around their necks. I thought they were from Thailand, but was it Africa? Who knows?

I bought myself a beach umbrella. I use it for weeding my vegetables. I’ve had it with the hot sun. It makes a difference.

Speaking of huge differences, how about last Saturday’s thunder and lightning storm? I took refuge in my truck. It was pretty terrifying. As I age, I have much more respect for lightning. The downpour that followed sure cooled things off, thankfully. Hard to believe we were the coolest spot in New England anyway.

I’m so bored with the debt ceiling and budget cut talks coming out of Washington. I was amused by John Boehner’s response to the President on Monday evening. “When spending results in large debt, stop spending,” he said. While that is good advice, there is another piece to that puzzle. Make more money. Why, oh why, are we so stuck on the no-tax merry-go-round? We all love our own government benefits but do not want anyone else to have theirs. Taxing the rich is apparently unpopular with rich congressmen.