You're Doing It Wrong

This didn’t photograph as well as I’d hoped.

I love how new notebooks are all smooth and flat (pile on the right). Then after you’d filled a bunch of pages they get puffy (pile on the left).

I have lots of these notebooks. Notes for writing or writing exercises or if I take a class or meet with other writers.

The smaller one I use intermittently for planning my day. I usually will go a string of days where it goes really well and then there will be a page where I write things like “off the rails” “who knows?” “total disaster.”

Even though I have a bunch of new notebooks waiting to be used, I can never resist buying new notebooks. Every year when school supplies are out I grab a few. This year I was certain I had resisted the impulse for awhile and was finally running low.

I got home and when I went to put them away I found I was not running low. Not even close.

This house is a huge attraction Halloween and Christmas. Amazing decorations.

We like to walk over there if the weather isn’t too bad. Cars lined up through the neighborhood.

I like the young pumpkin heads. (This is only a fraction of their display.)

This one also has little pumpkinheads in the lower left corner.

Another house on the same street. I love how these are posed as if in action.

I brought a bucket of apples from Orleans and spent almost a whole day processing them into applesauce and apple pie filling. I baked a pie that day and I put another batch of prepared filling into the freezer.

Because it’s so dry the apples were dry and weak tasting. I solved this problem by adding apple juice to the cooking apples and a few tablespoons into my pie filling.

I forgot to take a picture of my applesauce and the pie. We netted one giant bowl of applesauce to eat now and a couple of containers for the freezer.

When I slice apples all afternoon like that, I feel it in my hands and wrists afterward.

This was the entire pumpkin crop this year. Disappointing, huh?

I still have a ton of pumpkin in the freezer but I will probably buy a fresh one for my holiday pies.

Normally for November I post every day and I do some sort of National Novel Writing Month goal however things are going to remain busy for the foreseeable future.

At the moment my intention is a small NaNo goal and at least post a photo a day for November. We shall see.

It’s always painful to pull out the tomatoes when there are so many on the vine but the rains were coming and the air getting cold. I did it while I had the chance.

This is one of my best tomato years in a long time. We always had plenty to eat but never enough to worry about processing.

The green ones never taste as good as the ones that ripen on the vine but it’s a nice memory of summer.

These are more shots of my frantic day of gardening before the rain came. I was so busy working on the gravel and planting bed rehab projects that I was neglecting other basic putting the garden to bed chores.

I pulled up all the tomatoes and lots of dead flowers. I picked a bunch of carrots and beets but there are still more out there.

I’ll do another day out there before I’m done.

I also whacked back the rosemary that was getting a big as a car. It smells lovely but looks like a bad haircut.

When we bought this house, this circle of weeds and gravel was advertised as RV parking.

I’m pretty sure we couldn’t get away with that today especially since the driveway behind us is private. How would you get the RV in there? I imagine as long as you have a good relationship with your neighbor it’s doable but still.

I have long planned to turn the gravel into an area for planting. About 5 years ago I spent 2 hours sifting and gave up.

But I was inspired this year by an article about this small city property with lots of fruit trees and bushes and I re-applied myself.

That’s as far as I got–that “where the bodies are buried” little area–working really hard over a period of a couple of weeks. I thought it would go faster.

I was tossing the gravel in the front on the parking strip and Bob thought I was so clever moving the gravel. I didn’t know where else to get rid of it.

This used to be a rhodie and a hedge. The rhodie gave up life all of a sudden and I had the hedge pulled out and it’s been empty ever since. This was also a rehab project because the soil was a mass of roots.

But also neglected year after year. I had tomatoes and some volunteer annuals in there. Those little bits of plants are the pulled up tomatoes.

I was attempting to dig up some of the lawn and make the plant bed bigger but it was tough going and I ran out of time due to all the other zillion projects in my life.

Next year!

Check out this guy, stirring up the bucket and looking suspiciously at the camera.

I usually have the camera attached to the Spool of Destiny (spool) but lately I’ve been attaching it to a bucket so I can move it around more easily.

I had *just* scrubbed out the bucket and it’s all dirty again. After a few days of this it starts looking like a scary pond. Maybe this gives them more nutrients.

Life is insanely busy at the moment. I bet if we went back and pulled up a mid-October post every year going back we’d find the same thing.

I’m off to Orleans tomorrow for the week. Updates, perhaps when I return.

Bob and I went to Atlanta for a long weekend that turned out to be super fun and a great way to end the summer.

But it was a long day of travel and when we got home we were tired and trying to organize laundry and prioritize chores and responsibilities. I had to get prepared to go back to the office.

I found some rice in the fridge that had been there awhile and I tossed down the garbage disposal.

The garbage disposal decided that this was the day to die which we did not discover until we were finished with dinner and rushing to get things cleaned up so we could stagger off to bed. The main sink backed up, the auxiliary side backed up and for whatever reasons the sink in the laundry room is part of this series of tubes and it got backed up with gross stuff, too,.

If you have ever tried to problem solve with your partner when you are both tired and frustrated you can probably imagine how that all went. Plus, who doesn’t try to solve a problem using a bad idea? We won’t go into all that.

Anyway, we handled as best we could by ourselves before giving up and not the next day but the day after a plumbing team arrived to save the day.

Our disposal was from 2006 so no big surprise that had to be replaced. But the plumbing experts thought that the way our sink was set up underneath was problematic so they rearranged things so that now the LEFT is the disposal side and the right is rinse sink.

We have lived in this house over 20 years. The change makes better sense for our work flow and we trust the plumbers, but YIKES, it is hard to get used to. I am moving things back and forth over and over every time I’m in the kitchen. But it drains like a champ again.