I wore my gorilla costume while handing out candy tonight. I was at my sister's house. We live out in the boonies and no one ever comes to our house. Not that many kids came to Jan's.

One last golden holdout.

Walking in the woods, the wind is blowing fiercely, the tree tops swaying overhead in wide arcs, and the leaves almost all down, leaving the stark, lonely branches against the sky. But the golden rod has turned prophet, forecasting the snow that will cover the weed heads, branches, and nakedness of nature in general... soon. When is soon? All times are soon. Is this cheesey, or what?

Finally - Blue Skies

After ten days of miserable cold wet gray dreary poo-poo weather, today was beautiful. It started out with fog so thick that after I got about a mile down the road, I turned back and spent an hour at home, waiting for the sun to burn some layers off the cloud that lay on the ground.
All day at school I longed to be outside, soaking up some vitamin D. When the day ended, of course there was a teacher meeting that went twenty minutes over for the simple fact that every teacher has an opinion and thinks everyone else needs to hear it.
When I finally pulled in the driveway shortly after six, I grabbed my camera and ran down to the river to catch the last dying rays of sun as it crawled up the tree tops. I was enjoying my hunt for photos when I stepped in a hidden hole next to the river and fell head first down the bank. I expected the next sensation I had to be water up my nose, but I landed head down at a 45 degree angle. My head was about a foot above the water and my feet were in the air. I couldn't find a good hand hold of weeds or sticks to pull myself up, so I just lay there and yelled for help. I had heard the boys' voices in the back yard just before I went down, and they now came running. Sam took my camera, which I had instinctively held out of the water, and then he and David pulled me up. I was unhurt and just a little muddy.
Hamburgers for dinner.

On my way home from retreat, my children abandoned me for the bus, so I had freedom to take little photograpic side trips, limited only by the fact that I was totally exhausted and didn't want to fall asleep while driving home. This is one of those lovely compositions I would have missed had I not turned aside for a "wasted" ten minutes.

Life is just too busy to even think of something to say. Evey moment full or stolen...

Work up this morning to heavy frost. By the calendar, summer was over September 22, but according to nature, summer is over when frost takes out all the summer flowers and the garden vegetables, so now it's REALLY Autumn. The trees had stared to change, but the color will be much more noticable now. I have to try and enjoy it without the sadness of knowing everything is dying and soon we will be locked in the jaws of winter.