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the projected temperature for today was 100°; thankfully we only hit 97°. the dewpoint was up in the 60's which is humid but when i was watering the backyard this morning in the shade it felt pretty nice. as hot as it's been the past few weeks, at night the temperature drops into the 60-70's. there's been only one night where i had trouble falling asleep.

i went to the community garden in the early afternoon. i ran into sharon again, who said hello while my head was buried in some weeding activity. i picked off a few more SVB eggs. that one zucchini i had my eye on was finally ready to be picked, about a foot long; another one is growing on the vine, should be ready by this weekend. there's also a new cocozelle squash, currently the size of a pickle.

most of the shasta daisy flowers have droopy petals; this could mean it's time to cut them off to promote another wave of blooms, or they just might need more watering. i'm more excited about the delphiniums, with some of the flowers now showing some blue color.

in the afternoon i went to the assembly square mall. i picked up a large ball of yarn for my mother (sugar 'n cream sonoma print) and browsed the sprinklers at k-mart. they carried the ray padula RP-SREE spray nozzle ($11), which actually got some good online reviews (apparently it was spotlighted in some popular gardening magazine) despite an overwhelming consensus that ray padula products have substandard quality control and not honoring their supposed lifetime warranty. they also had some smaller rotating sprinklers but i wanted to see the selection at home depot so left with just a pair of female hose adapters. home depot sprinklers weren't any better, i left empty-handed.

i went to belmont to water the raised beds. my sister was home with her visiting friend nancy in the darkened air-conditioned living room, keeping cool. i dug up my container of liquid copper fungicide and mixed a 2 gallon solution (6 tsp of fungicide) in the plastic watering can and sprayed the cucumbers, the peonies, and the zucchinis. i'm pretty sure the cucumbers have anthracnose, and i'm just preemptively spraying the zucchinis and peonies to prevent a case of late summer powdery mildew (although so far not a problem with our stretch of non-rainy weather). not sure how effective the fungicide treatment will be, since we're supposed to get some thunderstorms tomorrow. fortunately there's plenty left of concentrated fungicide, so it'd be easy to whip up a new batch of solution.

i left with a bottle of thuricide and a syringe, for injecting into a few possible SVB infected stems in my own community garden. treating something like zucchini is much easier because the stems are so much thicker. i just don't know if thuricide has an experimentation date. isn't it supposed to be a live culture of Bt bacteria?

back at home, i was trying to stay cool. the temperature inside the house was in the mid-80's, but better than the 90's outside, so i had all the windows tightly closed. i ran a table fan in the living room and sat directly in front of it. that felt good but anytime i left the fan i could feel the heat in the rest of the house, particularly the bathroom. every time i felt a little sweaty, i'd take a quick shower. never did i think about installing the AC, although even if i wanted to i couldn't because i lent it temporarily to my great uncle. if we have another heat wave in august when i don't have a roommate, i won't hesitate to put in the AC. last year i didn't put in my AC until july 21st, and even then i only used it a handful of times because it wasn't a hot summer.

i ate the rest of my leftover vindaloo curry for dinner. when the temperature outside dropped below the temperature inside (86° was the tipping point), i opened some windows and put a dual window fan in the living room. the smell of wood mulch was thick in the air, the result of landscapers redoing a front edge garden a few houses down from here. even with the fan running at full blast, the temperature inside the house dropped by only 2°.