Kennebunkport Under 20 Feet of Water
Carmen whipped up a batch of ice-cold Viva Villas. A paradisiacal tequila cocktail for a still slightly warm fall day. It is still cool here during the day but we're beginning to experience pretty cold nights. However, untold numbers of acres in Spain are blazing away; people have died in the Western parts of the United States; parts of Wyoming are on fire; the Eskimos have complained that they can no longer fish the way they have since time immemorial; a glacier in Greenland is melting and moving into the sea three times faster than it was a decade ago. The summer home of a particularly nefarious and obnoxious family in Kennebunkport, Maine is under 20 feet of water! Well, we wish that house had been eaten up by the rising sea, leaving the rest of the world intact! Of course, that's just us dreaming, but eventually of course, it is going to be underwater, as, unfortunately, will much of the world's coastline as we now know it.

In the case of the house in Kennebunkport, well, sweet pie, they asked for it, since obnoxious George went to Gleneagles, Scotland and although his "friend" Tony Blair earnestly asked him to change his mind on the Kyoto Treaty, Dubya refused to budge, saying the Treaty would be bad for the U.S. economy. Well, what's bad for the economy is Bush, not Kyoto.
Liz, in reference to extreme worldwide heat, heat that can melt a brass door-knob, gave us this from Mark Twain: "When a person is used to 138 degrees in the shade [where Bush is planning to put us, permanently] his ideas about cold weather are not valuable; I believe that in India "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy."

Inside to Wait for the Dinner Gong
We were anxious to go inside and enjoy the warmth of the great room and spend some time with the kids who were not otherwise engaged helping in the kitchen. We were anxious for the dinner gong to sound since it had been a long, ard day and most of us had been out working since early in the morning. Charlotte, for the first course, served us some small bowls of Serrano Ham and Steamed Littlenecks with a parsley oil. She served this with a Prosecco de Conegliano, the delicious sparkling wine from Italy made under the Méthode Champenoise. Next, Max had made a cold White Gazpacho with Tiger Shrimp, and agreed with his wife Charlotte that the same Prosecco would marry well with the Gazpacho. On the same seafood path we had followed from the beginning of the meal, we decided to have some Broiled Striped Bass with Shallot Oil, and for the vegetables, some chilled fresh Spring Pea Purée and some just barely parboiled julienned carrots. The bass was prepared with crushed red pepper, ginger, garlic and shallots, so Charlotte and Max decided the best wine for the fish would be a Pinot Grigio.

Winding Down
Tonight we skipped dessert and went back to the great room to have after-dinner coffee with the kids. Considering how we live, and that we depend on rain to grow our hay and to keep our farms and ranches from burning, and that we depend, in the summer, on at least nights giving us some respite from the heat, we deplore Dubya's assault on anything that could help the environment. The world's greatest bully not joining the Kyoto Treaty really offends and frightens us. The fawn born very late in the season that we told you about might, we don't know yet, be due to this global warming George won't admit is happening. It's fall, and most animals will soon be getting their coats growing thicker for winter, and yet all over the farms we're seeing way too young fawns, and that's not normal. They will hardly be old enough to have the stamina to survive winter. You can't tell us there is no change occurring in worldwide weather patterns. Sick Dubya may think he's impressing the world by chopping cedar, but he doesn't know diddly squat about farming, ranching or the land. Really, when you think about it, he has the same common sense his Buschweiser twins have.