As far as I can find my county has a paltry 40% of its population fully vaccinated. That is very sad. So though I’m vaccinated, I’m still running errands masked. I don’t want mild COVID or to give it a chance to evolve.

So many ripe Serranos & other varieties. This is hands down our best year for peppers. It has taken many years of trial and error to get here. Hot sauce here we come! (Yes, we are eating some fresh). Oh and it’s fig season!🌱

red ripe serrano peppers on a planta pile of ripe peppers of various kindsripe figs

Volunteer sunflower from this morning. It took advantage of an emitter and I’m a sucker for known flowering volunteers 🌱

Wow big seismic signal from near Tahoe and also the Central Valley‽ Recorded by my #RaspberryShake @raspishake #ShakeNet mobile app. I didn’t feel it. ☹️

Edible garden update: we continue to harvest lots of red & ripe peppers for hot sauce. The tomatoes are basically done for the season at 195 tomatoes weighing in at 34 pounds. We froze most. And finally, our figs are starting to ripen and we’re on nectarine watch 2021🌱

Had a really good Independence Day fried chicken with a slaw based on real garlic aioli & ripe red Santa Fe peppers.

fried chicken on a baking sheet with slaw to the side (slaw has ripe red Santa Fe pepper slices).

I like Sierra Nevada’s Summer Break. Citrusy as expected and not too hoppy. It’s very refreshing. Just don’t expect a lot of complexity (it is a solid drinkable beer!).

The Annie Cat hoping neighbors don’t ruin her sleepy time with obnoxious fireworks this July 4.

Because of Safari’s new clearly bad UI changes, I’m not installing the public iOS and MacOS betas. Just listening to people talk about the new UI makes me cringe. I’m super excited about Focus though.

Tried Spotify again after a few years and it still is terrible for managing and listening to actual music libraries. Apple Music (my profile) is a revelation after using the Spotify app for 1/2 hour. Weird cuz Music app needs more work (and why Albums app is amazing).

Yesterday’s max temperature at my Orland, CA station was 115°F.

weather station chart from MesoWest showing States and a graph of weather measurements

View of the backyard before we shelter indoors from the heat the rest of the day.

Trees. Tomatoes, peppers, and a house with grapevines along a porch overhang. Deep blue morning sky.

Covered up the avocados again in advance of today’s 110°F weather. Every time we do this it gets simpler and better. Wrapping the sheet around a ladder is genius.

Sheets covering two avocado trees

Our peppers are now rapidly ripening. And they are crazy hot 🤤! 🌱

santa fe peppers ripening on a plantred ripe thai, santa fe, serrano, and jalepeno peppers on a cutting board

Windows 11 requires UEFI firmware. I use VMWare Fusion 12 Player (free) for Windows 10. Seems only VMWare Fusion 12 Pro can change firmware from BIOS to UEFI. Maybe VMWare will be nice and enable the UEFI option for Windows 11’s reqs. firmware = “efi” works not.

The lapins cherry we planted last November is dead. It only grew a few leaves. Super bummed. Stark Bro’s is great & gave me a 125% store credit, no hassle (with proof of dead tree via scratch test), so we will try again this winter. I have no idea what went wrong.🌳🌱

Last Monday, on the Bright Angel Trail at the Grand Canyon, we were lucky to see Spotted Towhees. They really blend in to their surroundings!

two spotted towhees in a messy treeadult spotted towhee with dark red-orange sides

Last Sunday at Hoover Dam. Yes, Lake Meade is visibly very low (look at that bathtub ring!) and perhaps the dam is all the more impressive because if it.

Lake Meade upstream of hoover dam with white bathtub ringlooking down the downstream wall of the damlookkng from the south of the damlooking at the intakes and upstream wall of the dam

No surprise why I spent today processing raw photos. Cool that Carrot Weather can report on my weather station.

Big Horn Sheep seen from the Bright Angel Trail at Grand Canyon NP last Monday. The young one hopped up from below and surprised the hikers. Glad I wasn’t there but had my Olympus TG-4 at the ready.

an adult big horn sheep under a rock shelteran adult big horn sheep under a rock sheltera young big horn sheep on the Trail with some hikers