Brrrr

Like a lot of people, we're in the teens (F) with snow coming down. It's a good day for hot brandy and writing with a dog curled up close by. Not so good for going out and covering roses that should have been covered all along (oops) but my DH and I did that too.

This is how mean I am. I make my DH smoke outside, even in this weather.

I hope everyone is warm and safe and well-fed. Keep your pets close, and don't forget ... in about ten days you can start some veggies from seed, provided that you have a plant light combined with a sunny window or sliding door area (the combination really helps) and that you're willing to pot your plants up at least twice. Herbs, tomatoes, eggplants and peppers are all worthwhile starting right now. And if you like hanging baskets, if you start them in March they should be huge by the time it's warm enough to put them outside! Just remember about that light requirement. They need a lot of light, and a good spectrum. I like using 4' aquarium lights in a shop fixture next to a window. I have my lights on a timer. Right now they're over my orange trees. I'm not sure what I'm going to do when I start my veggies, aside from make my annual mess when I rearrange everything.

Also next month, if you took your fuschias and geraniums into the garage, find a spot to hang them in the house where they'll get some light, start watering them, and prune them. The warmth, moisture and light will stimulate growth, and they should be in peak form by Mother's Day.

Almost Isn't the Season Anymore

A gorgeous Christmas Eve morning. Brilliant sunshine, a bit of mist on the river and between the hills, and the rain-soaked landscape has a diamond glitter to it. It's going to be one of those days when our goats and chickens will be out playing and chasing each other, and the dogs will be basking in the sunlight as if they're on a beach in 80 degree weather.

I'm not sure what to expect at work today. Panicked shoppers picking up last-minute things? That's a fair bet. Big crowds? I'm hoping not. That'll stress everyone out. Crazy driving? I pray people will remember that they're controlling thousands of pounds of deadly steel, and that you can't negotiate with physics or hit reset in the real world. Will folks be relaxed and ready to enjoy themselves after weeks of preparation? That would be sweet. And for everyone who doesn't celebrate Christmas, I hope that you'll find reprieve from the beautiful madness that burdens this time of year.

Well, maybe after the post-Christmas sales are done, and the return lines shrink back to normal.

Assuming the weather doesn't get dangerously playful.

Soon we'll say farewell to 2014. Are you ready to take stock of your year, and make your plans for the future?

Peace, joy, love and all good blessings upon you. May your day be bright.

Words and Rain

The rains have come.

I've been working on a particular book cover for a while now. It's making me crazy and stretching me to the limits of my abilities. It seems like every time I start to work on it, I run into a problem that I'm not sure how best to solve, and I end up watching a bunch of You Tube videos on Photoshop to figure out how to fix it.

The deck is all shiny. The rain-cleansed wind is pushing, pulling, making me want to explore. Beneath the trees next to our house, the air is full of the scents of ripe grapes, clean, musky mulch, and wet hay.

I've been copyediting too. I start to get involved in what I'm reading and I have to stop, go back, and look hard at each individual word. It's really hard to copy edit, and I'm not as good at it as I want to be. I know I'm missing things. I just have to keep going over and over and hope the stuff I do miss, everyone else will miss too as the story transports them into other worlds.

I've missed the clouds. Later I'm sure they'll feel gloomy and heavy, but right now they remind me of silver jewelry, campfire smoke, early mist on a mysterious lake, of winter days spent curled up around hot apple cider or hot chocolate.

The rains have come, and like the wanderlust the weather brings with it a drive to write. But I can't write yet, except for a few stolen minutes during breaks and lunches at work. I have this cover to finish, and copyediting to do. I have tomorrow off. I hope it rains. I want to get up early and write, and hike in the rain sheltered under an umbrella that the wind uses to play tug-of-war with me, and write some more, write until I can hardly keep my eyes open.

Summer's Cusp

The crickets and frogs sing through the cool evenings, and the morning mist parts to a glorious golden glow and frosted blue sky. The heat of summer never quite rises beyond the embrace of a warm bath. Impatience paces beneath the languor of easy weather with easy, flowing clothes and bare feet and sun hats. The hours of daylight have already begun to huddle and bow before the coming winter. Gardeners feast amid the overgrowth, ignoring weeds and the delicate touch of powdery mildew on pumpkin leaves, that autumn pest that comes with the vanguard of cold winds, the sooner twin of frost.

It's so warm and exquisite I can hardly imagine what's coming, but time's river flows and it's pulling me, the landscape changing around me as I'm drawn from summer into autumn. Autumn is opening her eyes, and she smiles that knowing, seductive smile. What games we'll play, what work must be done in preparation for the Cold Queen and her retinue. Better to get it done in advance of her arrival, for working beneath her heavy gaze is harder work than is made in the comfort of autumn's arms.

And I want autumn to rise and dance, even as I grieve at summer's passing.

Another lovely day in the making

The sun is uncertain and there's a cold wind, but I still managed to get a few minutes of reading in the sun beside the pool. I even took my sweater off and pulled my pant legs up to my knees. Soon, the thoughtful and generous Susan will be picking me up at the hotel. We may go to a light lunch someplace in Orlando. It's a drive (we took it the day before yesterday in a rented car) so it's very nice of her on many levels to come on over and see me.

People are wearing parkas, but it's not that cold for a northerner. Still, I'm going to bundle up if I decide to go hot tubbing later on. The official high temp predicted for today is 55, more than twenty below the average for this time of year. Not exactly brr, but it's a lot less fun to hot tub and then be nothing but layers on layers of goosepimples by the time I make it to the door leaving the pool area.

I'm not disappointed by the weather (much--it would have been sooooo fun to spend time at the water park right across the street.) It's been fun and relaxing and the flowers, wow, the flowers. So many varieties in bloom right now, and it's winter. I wonder how it looks in spring and summer. And the orange juice, and the margaritas .... Ripe citrus, really ripe, hand-squeezed, is amazing.

I love the bright orange of ripening oranges on the trees when we drive past the orange groves. I saw a nursery selling potted citrus trees--they were heavy with fruit and I so wanted to take one home, but it's impractical on a gizillion different levels. My orange trees really suffer, especially over the winter.

I truly love the Pacific Northwest. Having said that, there are a lot of really fascinating, wonderful and beautiful places in the world and I'm glad I get to visit them. Given a chance, I'd love to see Orlando again. Maybe next time, the sun will be out a bit more.

The Wind, She's a Blowin'

The wind, she's a blowin'.

Around here, the wind gets going pretty good.  The land makes a natural funnel, channeling cold desert winds into a breath-stealing, icy howler that makes me wonder things.  Like, how do the sparrows not turn into little feathered popsicles, much less fly?  Is the wind really blowing through my lined leather jacket or is it my imagination?  And most compelling of all ... how are there still leaves in the trees beside my house?  I have plans for those leaves, evil raking into flowerbeds to kill the weeds plans.  The wind shouldn't have to blow harder to get those things off.  I mean, my glasses are in danger of being blown off my face when I go out to the truck to drive to work.  A little leaf shouldn't be a problem.

Not that I'm super-excited about raking leaves in the wind.  I think that's a joke, or country wisdom, or maybe one of Aesop's tales.  Don't rake leaves in the wind.

But I hope to get those beds full of free mulch, bugs and all because the bugs are better than the weeds at this point.  Maybe the bugs will eat the weeds.

Nah.  That's just asking too much.

I pin the leaves down with branches, of which I also have plenty around the yard for free.  Those branches don't have leaves on them, which I think may be some sort of tree conspiracy.  If they still had the leaves attached, I wouldn't have to rake so many into the flowerbeds.

But I digress.

We have a really, really big branch up in the bigleaf maple still.  The plan is to get it down out of there tomorrow.  Will the wind still be blowing, or will it be rain?  Maybe we'll luck out and have both at the same time.  Then I could justify having a big hot chocolate with toffee whiskey in it.  Maybe even have one before and then one after.  Yeah!  I could get good and liquored up and do something super dangerous in inclement weather.

Okay, maybe not.

Hey, maybe the wind will blow that big branch right out of the tree!

Consider what it's done with the leaves, I'm thinking I have a better chance of winning the Powerball.  But I have my ticket, and you never know.  Because the wind, she's a blowin'.

Autumn Work

The weather forecast promises a wee bit of rain soon.  I dunno.  It's clear skies as far as the eye can see right now, and warm and beautiful.

The air has that autumn bite to it.  Makes me want to wander, explore, hike, get stuff done in the garden ....  The natural cycle of things makes me restless.  Is it a deep instinct written into my DNA, to either migrate to warmer climes or batten down the hatches for a long winter?  I can't say either way, but it feels good.  The grapes are getting sweeter every day, and the akebia fruit is starting to darken from a pale green to a deep, dusky purple.  The apples are ripe.  I still have tons of pears on the trees.  Though this year was kind of a bummer as far as the veggie garden is concerned, the arbor and orchard didn't fail.  In fact, they're better than ever.

If you're a gardener, now is the time (or past time, if it were a normal year!) to get out there and clean up stuff like crazy.  The work done now is work that won't have to be done in the spring.  Put fresh mulch down, weed, edge the lawn, prune trees and shrubs, and make everything tidy.  Note to self--put away all those tools still laying around before they're covered in snow.  A rake in the face kinda puts a damper on that first fun walk through fresh snow.

It's also time to start stocking up on winter supplies.  Rice, flour, sugar, butter, etc. will go into dry storage or the freezer.  If we're snowed in, we want to have plenty of stuff on hand.  I used to have lots of canned food too, but it actually takes up a lot of room, is usually over-salted and over sugared, and it's under-nutritious.  Better to keep the raw materials around.  This year I'll probably add a big bag of frozen sausage patties and frozen chicken patties.  That one year we were stuck for an extended period, they really came in handy and unlike the rest of our frozen protein, could be cooked without thawing.  I'll get those last.  The things that keep the longest and are the least expensive I'll get first, and I'll do it in installments this year instead of making one big trip.  The one big trip thing is fun, but sure hurts when it all gets added up at the register.  And this year, I won't forget a nice big box of hot apple cider packets and two big containers of hot chocolate mix.  Yum!

Happy Autumn Weather, everyone.  I hope your last days before winter are as beautiful as mine are.

Hanging in There, Waiting

My belly is full and now all I want to do is sleep.  The problem is that there are all kinds of things I have to take care of.  Besides, if I went to sleep now, I probably wouldn't wake up again until the middle of the night.  Fabulous for getting creative work done, not so much for going to work the next day.

That's rational, intellectual stuff, though.  My brain feels as heavy as my belly and my eyes feel sooo good when I shut them.  It feels even better when I lean back and rest my head and stretch my body.  It's like an all-over body massage.

Not gonna go there.  I have a book cover to finish, and a time line I have to do.  Those take forever, especially when I get sucked into the book.  Instead of skimming I end up reading, and I'm not a fast enough reader to get through a book in a day.  Plus, I want to get something done outside.  Watering, at minimum.

It is scary dry out there.  Between the lack of rain and the brisk wind, plants are literally shriveling up and blowing away.  I'm afraid we're going to lose one of our big trees as a result.  The mountain ash out front looks really terrible.  It's mostly brown.  We're in the midst of a record-breaking dry spell, with no end in sight.  We're a little late to the drought party, but it seems that the party is still goin' on.

Not good.

I have to be careful with our well water, too.  Like any other natural resource under stress, it's fragile.  I'd like to think that we have almost no impact on the local water supply, but that would be a dangerous assumption.  We can't afford to run our well dry.  So, sadly, we may have some losses this year.  As much as all of us here in the Pac NW love the sun and miss it all winter long, just about everyone I've talked to is ready for the rain.

Once it starts, it may not end until July, but we're ready.  Until then, I have to make the artificial rain fall, and hope that our luck doesn't run out of the end of that hose.

The Great Outdoor Mind Expander

We had a little bit of rain last night, and I wore a jacket to work.  It feels good.  And, bonus, the weather report claims we'll have a nice, warm afternoon.

With the next four days off, I'd planned on writing, editing and working on book covers for various Wyrd Goat Publishing projects, but with weather like this I'd much rather be gardening.  I may have to embrace the power of 'and'.  I'll probably be sore, tired, and coming back to work at the end of it will become needed recovery time.

It'll also be a good opportunity to write, edit and design book covers outside.  I think differently when I'm outside.  Something about the environment makes different parts of my brain activate.  I'm not sure it's quantitatively better, but when your focus is creativity then anything different from the norm is better for future work, learning, expanding, all that good stuff.  So the quality of work is probably the same, with some parts getting worse and other parts better thanks to the change in external environment, but overall because I'm doing some new things, in theory my work overall in the future will be better.

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it.

Pretty soon it's going to get pretty uncomfortable to be outside, not to mention that once the rain begins, it would be pretty dumb to expose my computer to that.  I think it's past time to pledge to work on my computer for at least an hour outside everyday, weather allowing.  We'll see how long I stick to that.  I'll keep y'all posted as far as things that change in my prose, editing style and artwork.  Anyone else want to give the challenge a try?

Weeds, Tea and Soup

The garden is growing really, really well.  Too well, in some cases.  Can you have too much bok choi? Apparently so.  Sadly, the goats don't like it, which I find weird, but useful in that the deer haven't bothered it at all.  I guess I have to eat faster.  Something to think about--bok choi, when cooked, forms a nice, not-too-thick gel.  It might be a good ingredient for soups.  If an experiment comes out all right along those lines, I'll post about it.

Anyway, I noticed something that produced a duh moment for me.

I have areas in my garden where not just the plants, but the weeds are positively huge.  It made me realize that the places that have small weeds are under-fertilized.  Sooo ... when I put the beds to sleep (heh) in the fall, when I put down my homemade fertilizer and cover things over, I can put extra in the places where the weeds are really pitiful, and less where they're gargantuan.

Not that I'll have weeds, of course.  Everything will be perfectly manicured and weeded by then.

But if I did have weeds, I could totally use them as a gauge for how much fertilizer to put down.  Aaaand, the beauty part, if I overdo it in the fall, its not going to burn my veggies because I won't have any in the ground at the time.  It'll have time to mellow for many months before I plant again.  Remember, though, if you add amendments in the fall, if they're super water soluble, they'll just wash away into the soil too deep for the plants to reach them in spring, so either protect against rain or just wait until after your seedlings sprout in the spring.  Don't fertilize when you plant seeds.  It messes them up when they germinate.  If you must, scratch the fertilizer in at least six inches, preferably farther, away from your seed line.

Speaking of fertilizer, I have a scary bucket of chicken poo waiting by.  I haven't decided what to do with it.  It's super hot, and only partially composted.  I'm tempted to spread it between the smallest of my zucchini plants and maybe make tea with some of it to water with around the fruit trees.  Chicken poo is awesome fertilizer, but you have to be careful.  It burns, baby, burns!  There's really no way to measure how hot it is, so I'll have to guess.  In cases like that, it's good to remember that you can always add, but you can't take away the damage from too much once it's done.  It's not like too much salt in your soup, where you can stick in a couple of celery stalks or add potatoes to fix it.

Soup again.  I must be craving it.  I think I'll make soup for dinner tonight.

Watch out for the weather.  Stay hydrated in hot spots, and look out for lightning.  We had an incredible lightning storm just east of us.  It sounded like fireworks show off in the distance, and for a while I thought that's exactly what it was, a post-4rth show, until I looked out the window.  Often there were multiple flashes at once.  We don't usually get that kind of weather around here.  I was very, very glad I could appreciate it at a distance instead of being directly under it.  It must have been terrifying.  Here's the weather report for it.  Photos here.  BTW, it takes three to four hours for me to drive from my home to the worst-hit areas of the storm, but I saw the closest edge of it quite well from our deck.

Blood, Sweat and Seeds

When I got home I had two M&Ms cookies with a cone of whipped cream on top, and then I went to work.  You'd think after a full day at the day job I'd want to put my feet up, or maybe at least cook some dinner and watch a movie or something.

That would be far too sensible.

We had rain in the local forecast, and I remembered I had all these old seeds I hadn't gotten around to planting.  Bags and bags of them.  And I thought, I'll just scatter them around and the rain will soak them in and what comes up, comes up.

But of course it's never that simple.

First I planted some ancient marigold seeds out in the veggie garden, and then I checked out the area I had planned for my mass old seed dumping ground.  It's about sixty feet long and ten to twenty feet wide, depending on the section.  The kids had, as instructed, dug out the majority of the blackberry roots, so I figured I'd just toss the seeds on the bare ground and go inside and have dinner.  I grabbed a rake (big mistake) and went to break the crust on the soil.

Hard as a rock.  Seriously.  I felt so betrayed!  Normally the soil under blackberries is quite soft.  They form their own sort of (evil) duff that keeps the soil moist and suppresses weeds.  And a few of the areas were like that, but way too much of it felt like baked clay so hard that I understood why even the grass hadn't started to take root there (yet.)  First I debated attacking the areas with a hoe.  Couldn't find one.  Then I considered  a shovel.  Mind you, this is after work, and I knew it would get dark soon, and breaking up rock hard dirt with a shovel is no light, quick task.

The impending darkness settled it for me.  I would get the big rototiller.

One sweaty, sore, throat-sore-from-suppressed-cussing half-hour later I had the whole section tilled.  I scattered the seeds, keeping particular kinds more or less together, raked the now (mostly) soft dirt to roughly cover at least some of the seeds in case they needed to be covered to sprout, and went home.  I had just enough time to gather eggs from the coup and close the chickens in for the night before the dark swooped in.  I had to turn on lights when I came in so that I could find my way around the house.

So now I'm thinking (I'm crazy that way) that I'd just put a whole lot of work into seeding an area that may or may not have viable seeds scattered on it.  So sometime this week I'm going to do yet another ridiculous thing.  I'm going to get a bunch of fresh seeds of something tall, bomb-proof and pretty, like cosmos or baby's breath or bachelor buttons (or maybe all of the above), and mix it with a big bag of potting soil and scatter that around the area as well.

That should fix it up real nice.

And then I'll be done.

Except for putting in the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and other stuff.

Oh, and I have a few more discounted bulbs to put in.

But then I'll be done.

Really.

Mostly done, anyway.

Weather Whiner

Here I am, suffering at our local McMenamins, eating fish and chips and trying out a new drinkie. (Bourbon Furnace--recommended as a nice alternative to a hot buttered rum or hot toddy if you like hot, sweet drinks with a little zip, which I do.) I've made quite a bit of progress on Confidante and I'm excited about re-releasing Masks with a new cover at the same time Confidante comes out. My DH is reading weird and funny facebook quotes to me. Life is good.

Life is also, apparently, cold. They (and we know they're all liars!) said that there would be some clearing today with an occasional shower. Well. My tomatoes and I are quite disappointed. They're all inside where it's relatively snuggly and warm, though I was shivering most of the day even with an extra pair of socks on, but the lack of light is going to make them all spindly and unhappy.

I know, I know. This is the Pacific NW. The weather doesn't really start to turn nice until June. Also also, we've had some very nice days, for which I should be grateful. I am. But really, isn't it kinda hard when you get a nice atta boy at work and then get yelled at for the rest of the week?

At least the rain doesn't stress me out, and I don't get depressed. But I do get whiny (obviously) and I'm tired of whining.

I'll still do a wee bit more, though.

I wanted to go fishing todaaaaaaay! Wah!

Seeds and Armor

Two seed trays, three bags of seedling mix, and a bunch of seeds rubberbanded together. I guess that normal people have potting benches out back or do this in their garage. I'm not normal.

I open the seedling mix bag and discover that it's essentially peat moss with a little vermiculite mixed in. Oh well, I'll know better next year. I got myself a soup spoon for a scoop, but that's for later. First, you gotta dump as much dirt into the middle of the tray as you can and then start spreading it out toward the edges. My favorite part is when I lift the tray three times and smack it (gently!) on the dining table to 'pack' the soil down. After I fiddle around with topping off the low cells, I fill the water-catcher tray with about a half inch of lukewarm water and let the cells soak it up. Ideally the cells will be nice and moist with almost no water left in the bottom.

Ah, nice, dark earth (well, peat moss and vermiculite mix--no dirt here) ready for seeds. Some seeds go one to a cell, some of them two. With the more spendy seeds I put in just one and hope for the best. With the less expensive ones I double or sometimes triple up, with the plan of snipping off all but the nicest one in each cell.

Poor things.

And then I put on the tray's 'greenhouse' cover.

I don't like the things, actually. They promote mold, which then has to be combatted with anti-fungals. But I had this worse problem than mold last year ....

And sure enough, after a trip into town, my daughter rats him out.

"Wizard stepped on your seed trays. Sorry, I couldn't stop him."

I lift the greenhouse lid. Victory! With the soil level slightly below the tops of the trays, and the smaller cell size I selected, plus the tough plastic of the clear lid ....

No kitteh footprints here. Yay!

I felt a little bad for starting my tomato and pepper seeds so late, but you know what? It snowed all day, non-stop. I might still be late-ish, but considering the weather, hedging my bets for a later plant-out might not be such a bad thing. I just hope that my indigo rose tomatoes have enough time and heat to ripen. They look soooo kewl!

Tom Riddle Update

We had a little more snow today at the house. I hope that whatever it does overnight, it doesn't keep me from work (again.) It's been quite an odd year for snow. We've had it as late as April Fool's Day before, but nothing that stuck for long, never mind kept people at home from work and forced the snow plow guy to come out.

The cats do not approve.

It's very, very pretty, though.

Speaking of cats, our feral/barn cat, He Who Shall Not Be Named aka Tom Riddle (and he is a tom--an unaltered male--with unknown origins that we refused to name in order to keep up the illusion that he's not actually our cat which makes his entire name fun-ly appropriate) had something weird up with his eye. It looked really bad weird, so bad I thought he might have lost it. He'd been missing for three days, which wasn't really unusual, but when he turned up with yellow smeared over his face, one working eye and ribs poking out I thought he might be in real danger of losing his life. We had a plan in place to capture him and take him to the vet, but whatever had been going on with his eye appeared to clear up on its own. He's still very thin, though. We'll keep a close watch on him. The plan is to catch him sometime this summer and have him fixed, so I don't want to move the timeline up (he might not do well in cold weather after surgery, and I don't think we can keep him locked up in the bathroom without the whole house ending up smelling like a meth lab) and I certainly don't like the idea of catching him *twice* for medical procedures.

So, we'll wait. Wish him luck.

Weather Blahs

Rain is predicted for the next long stretch. That's a normal forecast for this time of year, and most locals react to the news of spring rain with a meh, including me.

Except ....

We had such nice weather this year! So now a lot of people going by my counter are complaining. About rain in the Pac NW? Guess what? Me too.

I guess it's true what they say about contrast. You can't appreciate the sun without a little rain. Only, around here, a little rain is a lot of rain. Constant, icy cold, miserable, wind-blown, unrelenting, soaking rain. Did I mention it's cold? It actually feels colder than the snow did. No joke.

And the beautiful flowers at the store? Splotched and droopy, heavy with rain, the blossoms look like someone spritzed them with bleach and then squished them a little bit before spreading them back out. Not attractive. They're fine, of course. But our spring color is drooping, and it feels like winter will never end.

The ducks and slugs disagree. Best. Weather. Ever.

Animal and Weather Update

Wizard is doing well. The minor injury he sustained under his right front leg is healing nicely, thanks to a long line of stitches. He even spent some time outside today. He loved it. Sunny, warm, mild winds ... everyone enjoyed today, even those of us who had to work indoors at a day job.

I think a lot depends on whatever your local normal climate is, but around here when there's sun, people smile, liven-up, get stuff done, and there's a crazy amount of spring-fever energy in just about everybody. The usual for the Pacific NW is a week or three of excellent weather in February, preceded and followed by storm after storm with only rare sightings of blue sky between the clouds. This year has been anything but that--and the really weird part is that we had so much precipitation in our local mountain range that our snowpack is a little above normal. More sun and more snowpack?

I'll take it, thanks.

The thing that's got me a little befuddled is the worming thing. Goats ought to be wormed in spring time. Along with the flush of nice green grass come icky, nasty worms that can kill if they overload the goat's system too quickly. Usually I hold off on worming until April or May, depending on the average temperatures. This year ... yeah. I think I'll have to worm them on Sunday, and probably again in about a month. Two wormings this spring instead of one. That means an extra miniature rodeo. Since we'll be capturing and saving them from doom against their wills anyway, I might as well trim their hooves at the same time. They really love that.

I hope it doesn't rain on Sunday or I'll be muddy from head to foot. (Actually, muddy and covered in other, less savory stuff.) Yee ha?

Latest farm pics

The goats are all fattened up and ready for a long winter.  They put on more wool and more fat than other years.  I think they know something we don't ...

We had just a couple of inches of snow, much of which got melted by rain.  Today I got to enjoy one of my favorite sorts of days:  patches of sunlight and clouds, no wind, golden light on snow, blue sky shining through icicles, and occasional bouts of snow coming from silver and white puffballs floating overhead.

The chickens spent most of their day sunning themselves by the house.  When a particularly dark cloud went overhead, the roosters all crowed, and then crowed again when the sun came back.  They worked great as an alarm so I knew when it was time to head out and take a little walk around the garden.

They got frozen grapes for a treat.  I hadn't meant to freeze them--I just missed a few bunches, and since half the bright yellow leaves have now fallen off the grapes (the leaves are falling off the beech tree like rain now that we've had some serious cold) I discovered them.

Not pictured:  Brian and Finn chasing each other around the yard in the snow.  Beautiful white fluffy dogs enjoying the perfect day.

First Snow

It's a beautiful evening with big, fat, sloppy snowflakes falling outside.  It's a hot chocolate with a giant marshmallow nuked on top kind of night, a writing night, a reading night.  It's a night for sitting in the living room with the lights turned out, watching the deck light reflect off of frosted leaves and buried deck spars.  

Happy first snow, everyone!

Changes

I've been crazy busy at work, and the rains they are a-comin'.

Woke to the sound of rain this morning.  Been a long time since that's happened.  Our torn-apart porch is just a painted skeleton in pieces, waiting for a carpenter/paleontologist to put it together somehow with parts missing and all.  Poor old Dakota is having trouble getting back in the house after we let her out.  Her hips twinge when she tries to duck under the framework and it's a scrabble to make it up the slanted cement steps that collapsed into rat tunnels ages ago.  Those steps are actually pretty neat-o, but I bet the insurance company wouldn't like it if we just used them and gave up on the whole porch project thingy.  So something has to happen.

I vote for magical things happening in the middle of the night and we wake up to it all done perfectly with red and white intermingled roses growing all over a trellis on it.

The chickens are doing really well.  The Wyandottes will go on sale soon, hopefully to go to good homes though I wouldn't be offended if someone just wanted a really nice (though work-intensive) holiday dinner.  They're neat birds, but we've got two roosters too many and they're starting to stress each other out.

So, not much going on, and yet lots going on.  It's been a full week, and I'm looking for a day off so that I can make some headway on the home front.  And writing?  All I can say is, thank goodness for one hour lunches.

Raining

It's raining.  I love scent of rain after a long dry spell.  I wonder if all my incipient cantaloupes will split, but I won't really mind if they do because it's raining plip plop patter patter rain pooling and splashing and glancing off of leaves crisped around the edges even though I watered at least once a week because it's been so dry.

When it rains after a long dry spell I sleep a special kind of deep sleep, different though not better or worse than napping on a hot day.  It's a cool, slippery kind of sleep, mysterious and full of graceful omens.  Sometimes it's a little scary, but somehow peaceful at the same time, how the falling water carries my subconscious away and how everything, even my heartbeat, my breath, the pulse of blood changes with that first rain.  It's beautiful, but not as beautiful as when I wake up in the darkest time to rain.  The sound and scent and blissful cool soothe the heat from a weary body and parched skin drinks in moisture, easing pain so slight and pervasive only its absence is felt.

The rain dilutes itself over time, and I'll begin to drown as the rainy season floods my senses.  But in the beginning ... it's liquid magic.