late blooming and general lateness

Flowers
Haha, I was right, the Gruss an Teplitz is not dead! That's it to the left above, and besides the flower, it has put out shoots and leaves. Yay!
The cluster of pink, photographed from below, is Old Blush, which I've dragged up over the gate-arch. Otherwise, the Dortmund is blooming steadily away in red clusters and clumps, and Sir Clough has produced a couple of large blooms in sympathy with the recent heat-wave. The rugosa is dotted with bright red hips, its autumn show.
In the back yard, one of the gallicas is still blooming with manifold redness.

Roots
And this is my half-sister, from my dad's first marriage. Hi Darlene! Who cleverly found me and my brother, even though Barbara and Peter Gordon are not the easiest names to track down, especially when one of those names has been unexpectedly changed. This makes her cleverer than me, because my own haphazard googling for Darlene and Lorene over the last few months had come to nothing.
So on Monday, after she had returned from Mexico and I had returned from Pennsylvania, she visited, and we met for the first time.

It felt surprisingly comfortable, at least to me, as if we'd known each ther for a long time, and were just catching up on recent news. Now I'm looking forward to meeting Lorene, and for Pete-and-family to be moved in to the new place so we can unpack the family photos and see how many we can identify properly.

Shoots
In other news, the 3-Day Novel Contest is this weekend (glyph of writerly excitement), and what with my wonderfully eventful regular life, I've barely thought about it. This year it will come with extra bonus GUILT because I had hoped and planned to have Willow Knot all revised and mailed off before Labour Day weekend, free and clear.
But no. The structural revision is done, but I haven't filled in all the new scenes in the last part of the story, plus as I read over I keep finding little traces of the previous chronology, and have to fix them. Apparently I did a lot of work tying down the sequence of events and marking how many years / summers / antlers / etc. had arrived. A lot, and have had to do it again.
I'm not sure what this is most like, whether unpicking embroidery or like the ravelling that the court ladies do in the story, unlacing goldwork into spools of thread. Or, for a more guy-like metaphor, imagine you've made the Lego(tm) Space Station, but you have to take it all apart so you can build the next thing. How hard is it to turn the little command centre into a pile of blocks? Do you want to keep at least the captain's chair out of the general undoing?
Yes, I know, this is why one saves each draft, to avoid 'really' losing anything. I've been telling myself this a lot. It should be done by the 14th, though I'll have to do a thorough read-through to make sure that I haven't done anything really embarrassing with the chronology.
But this weekend--this weekend is dedicated to squashing a messy first draft down onto the page, and not thinking about it. Wheeee! I even have a really disgusting plot element, though perhaps not as intense as previous winner Skin, by Bonnie Bowman, or Tacones, which I still have a hard time reading.


Fruit
To bookend with garden news, the Transparent is done, thankfully, but the pears and plums have started falling and it's time to fire up the dehydrator.
Blackberries have reacted to the severe cutting back by, of course, fruiting madly. I've frozen and bagged a few quarts and made 6 pies so far, 3 for the freezer and 3 baked. Here's a pic of the second baked pie--look, flaky pastry!