I always think of Halloween as the official start to winter. I was hoping to get some nice fall shots this year, but then we had a lot of rain followed by a lot of wind.
It’s one long slide towards Winter Monochrome from here.
There are still a few leaves clinging to the branches of the burning bush.
But the fallen leaves are just as pretty.
Some of the roses are still hanging in there.
Others aren’t faring as well.
The Japanese maple was beautiful before the weather hit. Now it has exactly one leaf left hanging.
When I moved around to take a picture of the cinnamon maple, I found this beauty tucked behind one of the piles of split firewood.
You know you live in a mild climate when your roses look like this, on the day before Halloween!
This week it was cold enough that I was motivated to bust open the box of winter knits.
Whose great idea was it to knit an afghan that’s five feet long, and only two feet wide?
I also had to laugh when I saw that I hadn’t dealt with the last three loose ends before cramming it into the box. Or bothered to remove the stitch marker.
Harriet is proving to be the watchdog of my mini-flock. She’s the only one who even notices when the neighbor dogs cruise past.
(That’s not even a dog, really – it’s a very large five-month-old puppy.)
And when the big scary great blue heron landed near the coop last week, Harriet is the one who sounded the alarm call. When I went down to shoo the heron away, I saw that Harriet had gotten the other three to bunch up together beneath the coop for safety.
But I also vote Harriet as “Most Likely To Peck My Eyes Out If I Slip And Fall Inside The Chicken Tractor.” So there’s that.
Egg production has dropped off slightly as the season progresses. By my last calculations, we’re averaging about 2.75 eggs per day.
That’s not too bad, considering we only get about 11 hours of daylight right now. And I was informed by many sources that “hens stop laying when hours of daylight are less than N.” Where I’ve seen N equal anything from 14 to 17.
This concerned me, because at this latitude that would mean that the chickens would be laying eggs for about three months a year. (Or NO months per year, if we go with 17.)
I figured this wasn’t the case, but I’m always glad to see common sense get backed by empirical evidence.
Now that I’ve finished the toe-up socks (an experiment I consider a success, by the way) I’m working on a new project. But you know what I’m not working on? That damned Celtic Cabled Scarf.
A lot of people would suffer through knitting the entire scarf, and then post a picture of the finished object. “Tra la la, this pattern was super easy, you memorize the cable pattern right away and then just knit away without a care in the world!”
Which of course makes you feel stupid and un-accomplished, while revering them for being Gods What Walk The Earth. Except that it’s all a lie, a lie told to make people feel bad about themselves. And where does that kind of thing get us? Nowhere.
I call this “The Martha Stewart Effect.”
Anyway. The Celtic Cabled Scarf is a gauge that makes my fingers ache to knit it, and pretty much every stitch on every right side row has to be cabled in one direction or another. I’m about ready to give up. It’s been in the Time Out Drawer for so long that it smells like drawer – a little bit skunky, with minty overtones from the box of dental floss.
This is me, 1) trying to decide if it’s long enough to wear as a tuck-in (it isn’t) and 2) wondering, “What’s that smell?”
For some reason, I am plagued by Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA.” Whenever I turn around, it’s playing at me. I can’t escape it, nor am I moved by it, so I always end up mulling over the lyrics until it’s finished.
If you haven’t heard it, here’s the music video:
The lyrics, for your reference, can be found here. (Warning: eight billion ads, just like every other lyrics site.)
Forthwith, some observations:
1. Not many pop songs reference cardigan sweaters. Maybe only this one.
2. The premise of the song makes me sneer. We’re meant to believe that Miley Cyrus – Miley Freakin’ Cyrus – is a regular old down-to-earth girl who finds herself outclassed and starstruck in Hollywood.
Miley Cyrus has been a household name since she was nine. Her daddy was a household name before she was born. She’s worth about twenty billion dollars, more or less. Get real.
You can tell this is a problem, because the lyric “The DJ’s playing my song” is ambiguous. Is the DJ playing her song, or her song?
3. She references three artists whose songs made her feel happy and at home: Jay-Z, Madonna, and Britney. When asked “Which Jay-Z song, specifically?” in an interview, Miley airily explained that she just picked artists’ names at random.
This means that one of the following is true:
A) Miley doesn’t have any favorite artists, because she doesn’t listen to music.
B) Miley has favorite artists, but she doesn’t want us to know who they are, so she picked famous names at random.
Neither option is particularly flattering.
4. I understand how you can “nod your head like Yeah.” But I don’t understand how you can “move your hips like Yeah.”
I particularly don’t understand how you could “move your hips like Yeah” while seated in a taxi cab.
