Yes, the Creu de Lavit. On our trip to Spain, we took ourselves to el Celler de la Boqueria. The owner recognized me from the wine class I took there in December 2002, a time when you may recall that I did not really understand Spanish, let alone the techno-speak of viticulture. The highlight of that class was when I got up the courage to answer a question and declared that a young red "smelled of coffee." The teacher nodded and told me that, thanks, but that was impossible. But all was forgiven when we showed up this summer, credit card in hand, for a tour of the wines of Spain.

The owner hooked us up with six bottle from different parts of the country and a nice wine box, which he tied with string in a manner that made a handle that sliced my hand very nicely as I lugged it through the airport. Now the wines are in our second fridge with the thermostat turned up to 47 degrees, but some research into the intelligence of using a fridge as a wine cellar has me scared of the lack of humidity. So we've begun drinking, in order to save the wines. This one was nice. I can't say more about it than that. But Larry Walker of Wine and Spirit International found it nothing less than sensual.

Gymnastics commentary is becoming intolerable. In a sport understood by a tiny fraction of the US viewing audience and in which fortunes are made and lost based on tiny asymmetries and hundredths of a point, you?d think that announcers would have plenty to talk about. Say, explaining why no one ever gets anything but a 9-point-something, even though the scoring is out of 10. Their repertoire seems limited to the following topics.

• Romanians are mystical beings who perform front handsprings in the womb and are trained from birth to be Olympians. Pretty much, that's all anyone does in Romania. How cute!
  
• The farthest distance between two points in the known universe is smaller, metaphorically, than that between Waukesha, Wisconsin, home of Paul Hamm, who just wants to focus on the sport and not on arguments about why we keep cheating the South Koreans at the Olympics, and Athens, Greece.
  
• Speculation about whether an athlete "ever thought he'd be here, in Athens, the birthplace of the Olympics."
  
• The tiny hop on the landing. No one sticks landings anymore.
  

Of all the things to talk about, the incessant comments about the hop on the landing bother me the most. To most TV watchers, the hop is the only easily visible thing. The rest requires some knowledge of gymnastics. Then, they go to the smug, "any fool could see that," tone to say that someone's routine was way better or way worse than the last one. They use wine words to clarify: "Oh, he was just so crisp there! The finish was really clean, and so smooth." There has of yet been no talk about anyone's nose, but it bet it's coming.

Also, Mrs. Lopes next door caught the groundhog and one of its children by baiting a trap with...no, not nice fresh vegetables, which the groundhog appears to love eating. The answer is pastry.

These tomatoes are nice, especially the yellow ones, but what's important is not tomatoes. It's bees. The front of the house is being overrun by bees who have moved in to a tiny crack in the siding. I shudder to think about how big the nest is that they must have built between the studs. On several occasions, now, I have attempted to poison the bees by spraying dangerous chemicals all over the front of the house. Though we are scared of bees, we are not scared of inhaling things that kill bees. So far, after going through two cans of mustard gas (bee strength), we have killed one bee and two spiders.

Oh, the groundhog. All summer, there's been a sort of agreement: you leave the tomatoes and zucchini alone, at least, and we'll concede the carrots, peas, and melons. Fine. Next summer, we will find a way to kill you. But now a line has been crossed, my friend.

If only I knew how to respond. Do you know how it feels to not be able to protect your loved ones?

I’ve recently put myself on a strict schedule. See, I was going to work all day, just about every day, and in so doing I was just falling behind. So I fired up the old electronic calendar and started typing. It works ok, but in order to fit everything in, I had to move the “Start of Day” time to 8 am, and I don’t really like waking up early enough to get to work by 8.

Also, I had to move the end of the day to 6 on some days and 7 on others, and that’s not really conducive to my lifestyle, either. But I persist. If I can get myself to actually drop what I am doing when the little alert comes up on the calendar and move to the next task, it really works. I even hurry things along once in a while in order to beat my self-imposed deadline. Weird.

I will tell you this: all this discipline is exhausting. Have the rest of you been doing this every day? Right now I am considering it an emergency measure until I get a few big projects done. But I suppose I need to consider the fact that it could be an everyday sort of thing, this…focus.

Writing this sort of thing is not on my calendar.

Here I am after running the Brewster Brew Run with Leah's friend, Leah. Yes, two Leahs. One does not run unless late for a dinner reservation. I was a little nervous for this race because, not having raced in a while, I forgot the most important rule of road racing: don't eat Eggs Benedict for breakfast before setting off on your run. But there were no ill effects. I was in better shape than the teenager in front of me who, on a dare from his friends cheering him on, drank half a can of Budweiser around mile 4, then turned into the woods at mile 4.05 to vomit it right back up. Teenagers.

Great gosh almighty. Somewhere hidden under the enormous zucchini leaves, exposed yesterday by the dining patterns of our evil groundhog, was this monster. It is at least 5 inches longer and perhaps another 2 in diameter than our last huge zucchini. Here you can see its grandiosity compared to a standard Leah. Note how it is making her smile. Nobody doesn't like an oversized vegetable.

We go away for two days, and everything that the stupid groundhog doesn't eat gets enormous. Here you can see how big one of our zucchinis is, compared to a standard cell phone.