NYC skyline. We were moving my father-in-law from Florida to Massachusetts, in a moving van with a car-trailer behind. Right after snapping this picture we had to cross the George Washington bridge, where the normal toll is $12, but for us with the truck and the trailer it was a whopping $53 to cross one measly bridge.

This is me a few years ago in the Smokey Mountains. Wish I could say the horse was mine, but no rented for a 6 hour ride. Was wonderful!!!

This picture is the opposite of Jim's. It's a Zamboni driver (a machine that's used to smooth the ice when playing hockey) going through the drive-through. He had taken it home to work on it, and was returning it to the arena, and stopped for a coffee.

Rebecca, Congrats on the Big Beefs! Any day that the dewpoint starts that high usually is not a good day. We 'almost' had a good day yesterday. Our dewpoint started high like yours but slowly fell all day long. Unfortunately I guess it didn't fall far enough fast enough. Our forecast said our max heat index would be 102 (compared to the previous day's 110) but they were wrong---it still hit 106. Still, 106 was better than 110. To me, when the overnight low is 80 or above, that's also a bad sign, and we've already had that this week too, though it is more common for nights in late July or early August to stay that hot. Jennifer, I agree. These hot nights aren't giving us much of a break. With fall tomatoes, I prefer to get them planted in late June or no later than the first week of July. Mid-June is even better. You want the plants to be large and in bloom when the daytime highs fall back into the right range for fruit set. Exactly when that happens will vary from year to year, but often it happens for much of the state around mid-August when the early August heat rampage breaks. My experience is that most people in OK plant them too late and don't get a lot of ripe fruit from them for that reason. Beans do not produce well in heat, and often do not produce at all in the heat. That is why we plant them so early here (April, and at my end of the state, in late March in a warm Spring)---we have to beat that heat. They drop blossoms without setting beans once the temperatures get up into the 90s and stay there consistently. The time to plant pole beans for fall production would be mid-July and the time to plant bush beans for fall production would be around August 10. Spider mites also are a big issue on bean plants in hot weather, which is another reason that beans don't do well as a hot weather crop here. If you like to grow Lima beans, I have found that they produce much better in the heat than snap beans do. We have had frosts as early as the end of September some years, but I don't think that has happened in a long time. It did happen our first year here.....and is another reason I have invested all that money in floating row covers. You can cover up your fall crops on the night of the first 1 or 2 freezes and often that's all you have to do---just get them through that first oddly cold night or two and then we'll have another 4-6 weeks of warm weather during which time your plants will be producing like gangbusters in autumn's milder weather. I didn't do much in the garden yesterday, just harvested enough bush beans to put up three pints in the freezer, and harvested more tomatoes (an everyday thing at this point). I've been staying busy on these hot afternoons processing the produce for fresh eating or freezing or canning so that nothing piles up too much and becomes an insurmountable mountain of produce that I dread processing. I don't think I'll do anything garden-related today. I need a day off, and I need to go to the store and run errands and all that stuff. Plus, there's rain in the forecast although our chances for today are really low. I think our big rain here won't come until Sunday night, possibly in the overnight hours. Our local TV met showed us the predictor model he uses and it showed the rain getting here really late, and he said he didn't believe it and thought it was 'off' and that we'd likely see rain 6 or 7 hours earlier than the predictor said. That would be Sunday evening and not Monday morning like the predictor model was showing. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll harvest whatever tomatoes are at the breaker stage or beyond, and any other produce that is ready. That way I'll at least get everything up into the house before the rain comes again to try to ruin the tomato flavor and make them all crack. Summer rain is the enemy of our tomato fruit, unfortunately. Have a great Saturday, everyone, and stay cool. Dawn