Of Autumn Beauty & Chores Most Necessary

DSCN3109Our weather this week has been perfect.

The night temps are down into the 50s while the days are in the 70s.  We have clear blue skies with sunshine going on during the day.

Twinkling stars have filled the sky at night, while the moon, which is now waning, has been such a small crescent that its light doesn’t diminish the shining stars.

With all due respect to December and the holiday season, I’d suggest that this is the most wonderful time of the year.  

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I noticed the stars early this morning while I was taking the screens out of the windows.

Late yesterday afternoon I got a phone call from the man who cleans our gutters and washes our windows.  He asked if he could come over today, the weather being so nice and all.

I said “sure.”

So very early this morning I removed all the screens from the windows, and gazed into the dark blue starry sky, appreciating its simple beauty.

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DSCN2192Tomorrow the sprinkler system will be deactivated for winter.

The man who does this is a delightful, talkative character who always leaves me laughing.  The stories he tells, often about our neighbors, are, shall we say, insightful.

But after he’s finished blowing the air out of the underground sprinkler system, the rest of the winterization chores will be ours to do at our leisure.

Or not to do at all, I suppose.

And on that tentative note, I shall end this post.  An old-school style blog post that offers no controversy or angst to the blogosphere, but tells its own quiet little story.  Such as it is.

As Autumn Arrives A Legend Returns: Hello Fuzzy The Squirrel!

•  The squirrels have been scarce around our yard all summer, allowing me to grow pots of petunias, and now pansies, unbothered on our deck.

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•  So imagine my surprise yesterday afternoon when I saw Fuzzy the Squirrel on our deck for the first time in months.  I’d begun to wonder if he was still around.

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•  Naturally he was causing trouble, indulging his appetite for destruction in the right-hand pot, while prudently avoiding my new cute jack-o-lantern decorative spike thingie.

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•  To his credit, once he realized that I spied him, he tried to hide from me behind one of the pots, while pretending that nothing untoward had happened to my petunia.

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•  Then taking a different approach to destruction, our friend, Fuzzy the Squirrel, began digging into the left-hand pot while I watched.

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•  However, I’m happy to say that he quickly became bored with the whole idea of ruining my pretty Halloween tableau.

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•  He jumped up onto the deck railing where he purveyed our forested backyard… where he should be, imho.

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•  Then turning my way for one last photo, he posed so that I might snap him next to my new cute jack-o-lantern decorative spike thingie… which he better not damage. Or else.

~ THE END ~

Hazy Summer Days & A Less Than Brilliant Idea

Over the weekend we went for a walk on the trails in a wooded, overgrown section of a city park.  It was hazy and hot outside, but it seemed like a good idea to go for a walk… at first.
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In my mind this walk was going to be a glorious opportunity to photograph the flora and fauna we saw along the way.  Yes, I was going to capture, for all time, the beauty of late summer.

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I had my camera with me, but thanks to the hazy weather conditions + lens-smudging humidity most of my photos aren’t clear enough to be of any interest to me– or anyone else.
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I share these three photos which are, trust me, the best ones of the bunch.  No pithy story to go with them, however.  Only a realization that I need to check the weather forecast before going on a walk… if my camera is coming along, too.

Organizing Gibberish Thusly

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First leaf with Autumn color says, “Look at me!”

THIS WEEK I’VE BEEN SORTING through my desk drawers and my computer files.  I save lots of ideas, either scribbled on bits of paper or quickly typed on computer sticky notes.

I keep these ideas as prompts just in case I need something to write about here.

Like today.

MOST OF MY SAVED ITEMS are snippets of thoughts that float through my mind while I’m doing something else, so they’re not fully formed ideas.  In fact, they are generally pure gibberish.

But I continue to believe that one of these saved items will be the best idea ever, so I’m reluctant to throw any of them away– until I do.

I could be deluded, of course.

[Rather like Gayle King and her massive purse + jewelry collection, featured in O magazine this month.  It’s a collection so unwieldy that it required an outsider to sort through it, culling out that which no longer serves her.]   

[Alright, maybe my little pile of ideas is nothing like Gayle’s purse collection, but you get my drift.  Too much of anything is confusing.]

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Underwhelming decorative Summer grass says, “I’m not dead yet!”

I WON’T BURDEN YOU WITH a list of my half-formed ideas.  I respect your time and sanity, my gentle readers.

But I just wanted to let you know that I’m still moseying along the blogging trail.

Tossing and deleting the gibberish as I go.