SUMMER NOTES: Signs of the changing season from indoors and out

Summer is suddenly upon us, with the thermometer topping 90 for the first time.
Inside the house, my fish-oil vitamins are sticking together, and the toothpaste has an entirely different and looser consistency from its winter one. The chewy ginger cookies that I bake sag and crumble unless I keep them in the fridge.
Outside, the chickadee babies have flown the coop, and a pair of wrens have taken over the bird house and are building the own nest (I peeped in after the chickadees left, and the only thing remaining was a two-inch-thick bed of soft moss). Ticks and poison ivy are here. Bats are swooping around at dusk (love them!). Fast-growing young groundhogs, rabbits and foxes are looking less like the babies they were only a few weeks ago.
A friend in "downtown" Unionville commented that she hasn't seen lightning bugs yet this summer, and I hadn't either until Sunday evening. And my hummingbirds were here briefly in May, but I've seen only one or two at the feeder since. I'm keeping fresh nectar in it anyway.
The giant thistles in the field behind my house are majestic and there are so many that they produce a pastel lavender haze in the midst of all the green. I'd love to try taking some artsy silhouette-type photos, but I'd have to trek through high weeds to get there (see the sentence about "ticks" above), and keeping the high-tension lines out of the photo would be next to impossible. (My first lesson in photography was to look around the subject and make sure there wasn't a telephone pole growing out of his head.)