For several weeks now I have been complaining about the heat and lack of significant rain. Why should this week be any different? It is difficult for me to maintain a cheerful attitude when everyone is hot and crabby. I remember a sociology teacher in college who gave us some crazy statistic about temperature. It was something like, for every degree above 90 the murder rate jumped at an alarming rate. Hopefully we can all control ourselves until fall.

The garden has gone to wrack and ruin. I love that expression! I have weeds chest high and a remarkable number and variety of bugs. How can it get away from me so quickly?

Next to the tomato hornworm my least favorite pest is the squash bug. This guy has just hatched on my pumpkins, yellow summer squash and started on the winter squashes. The eggs are on the under side of the leaf in neat little rows. When they hatch they look like alien creatures, gray with long legs and move very quickly. The only good news is they only have one generation per season. No matter! They do plenty of damage — sucking the very life out of the leaves and then the stems and fruit. I dosed them with a mixture of neem oil and water on Saturday morning and squished hundreds in my ungloved hand. Yuck! I have no pride.

We had our first Saturday evening dinner in the garden. We served a hunk of pork from last year’s pig. It cooked in a covered cast-iron Dutch oven right in the coals of our fire. Seriously delicious. We had fresh dug Irish cobbler potatoes and onions in another Dutch oven slathered in olive oil and butter. Potatoes are always a big hit. Green beans with a drizzle of pork fat completed the main course. An extra treat was a beautiful slab of fresh Edgartown Seafood swordfish.

Cucumbers and tomatoes are enough for a salad this time of year. I don’t bother planting lettuce for summer.

I mentioned all this wonderful produce and a menu so I could make myself feel better that there really is a purpose in all this hard work.

I dropped off my granddaughter at the YMCA summer camp last week and noticed that the fall asters were blooming in the new plantings. I wonder if things are so early this year that we will be having a fall in August. I’m also curious about how warm it has been for so long. I hope it is not a hurricane magnet. These are just paranoid musings of a person who has had it.

Are Senate Republicans completely tone deaf? They voted against the new financial reform bill which offers more transparency into Wall Street, better credit card information, consistent rules and consumer protection. These are the same people whose President Bush ushered in the Wall Street bailout.

Then again, they refuse to pass the extension of unemployment benefits. Now, all of a sudden thay are super concerned about the national debt. They didn’t seem to think deficit during the Reagan years or the eight long Bush ones. Now, the big talking point is that extending the Bush tax cuts will save money. I know I slept through most of my Economics 101 class in college but I wasn’t dead. Happily, Senator Byrd’s replacement will be voting by the week’s end.