October Arrives

and we prepare for a cozy winter. I hope we'll get to sleep a lot and llie around late reading with this cuddled up to me.



Most of the apples are gone off the tree and I have five buckets waiting to be sliced up and dried into delicious apple chips. It takes time to peel them, take out the cores and slice them thinly on the drier trays. Then at least overnight to dry them. Usually we wait for a frost to pick the apples but this year we still haven't had one and since the bears weren't going to wait to eat the crop, we decided we better pick the apples now if we wanted any.

I still have eggplants and tomatoes ripening in the garden. In October. Next year I will try to remember that it is possible to have such a long season and I will replant some things. This summer was so busy with the studio renovation and visitors I didn't have time to think about the garden. The weeds took over but it was very productive anyway. Maybe with global warming New England will have more farms again and more farmers markets.

Yesterday the kits were out until 4 P.M. when it started raining. Harper had nabbed a goldfinch which I rescued, and after I lugged him in and gave him dinner he carried on for quite a while complaining about it even as the skies opened up and the rain poured down. Today is a dark, dark morning. We are moving all of our stuff upstairs to the new studio so the guys can build the first floor kitchen. I will be working on our boating video project. Yes I know it is Sunday but we need to have this piece in progress and it is painstaking work, hunting for the exact clip which illustrates what the narrator is saying.

Soon we'll expand the cat fence over to the studio building and maybe figure out a way for the cats to be able to get to us when they want to. Before we had the fence we would leave the doors open when we could and Finnegan would be so proud of himself when he found me at work. I'll never forget the time he scaled a slick plastic shed and a story of barnboard wall to hang by his nails under a window screaming for me. We had to open the window (one of those that cranks out) without knocking him off. So I cranked and Olof grabbed and we dragged the fourteen pounds of feline in. He was very proud of that feat, let me tell ya.