"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
Awoke this morning with a toothache, a sign that the broken filling I've been nursing along for nearly a month is taking a turn for the worse. And my dentist can't see me until September. There might not be much to see by then.
Meanwhile Biden had another disastrous evening, this time at a press conference marking the end of the NATO summit, calling Zelensky "President Putin" and his own vice president "Trump". Politico reports that New York is a battleground state this time around, after Biden won here by 23 points in 2020. The Caliphate of Michigan is pledging in the NYT to vote against him en masse, probably placing that state out of reach. David Brooks writes that, after decades of eschewing the notion that we need a set of shared values, and telling ourselves everyone should be free to do his or her own thing, our country is particularly vulnerable to a messianic authoritarianism, this time embodied in a real estate huckster from Queens.
All sort of depressing. So let's change the subject.
This morning while I was reading the paper on the front porch, enjoying temperatures in the mid-60s for once, I noticed our neighbors' brilliant blue hydrangeas.
You can sort of see them there behind all that foliage I never quite get around to cutting back.
This had me wondering whether our soils are truly that acidic, or if Patience (that's really our next-door-neighbor's name, right out of a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel) is treating her yard with something.
The answer, I think, is perhaps both. With a little digging (pun intended) on the internet, I found an exhaustive New York soil study that shows the soils here on what's considered the western edge of the Allegheny plateau are in fact fairly acidic, an artifact of the glaciers pushing soil and rotting vegetation south from Canada during the last Ice Age.
But those hydrangeas seem almost unnaturally blue to me. So my guess is that maybe they are in fact getting a little help from the gardener.
At the same time, our water here is extremely hard, which you would think might mean the soil is more alkaline. Hard water is "hard" because it carries a high concentration of calcium carbonate and magnesium, which in turn would suggest the soil the water leaches through is high in those minerals. Such soil would, pretty much by definition, be more alkaline. And yet here it's not. I wonder why?
That question will need to hang there for a while. It's a crowded morning, with a hearing at 8:15 central and two phone conferences, and me in between trying to finish an appellate brief that's due today. Phil up at Cayuga Wooden Boat Works called last night to let me know they'd fixed the Chris Craft after figuring out it was only running on two cylinders (no wonder it could barely turn the prop in the water), and I'm hoping to run up there after lunch and pick it up so P and I can take it to Canandaigua and toodle around the lake this weekend. Not a bad way to spend a birthday.
I just pee on my hydrangeas at night to keep the soil acidic if you want blue 🔵