Happy Halloween

Black cat (Pyewacket)Brown Echinacea

Sunflowers

Rye (cause of mental illness in Salem "witches"?)

All the grasses have gone to seed, ready for next year.

Poor flowers. But the oregano and other herbs are still healthy, despite temps in the teens at night. Herbs rule!
That's all folks.

Next...Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas. A little preview...

Chickadee in a Christmas tree

Pine cones and Oregon grape
SnowberryIt's 1:00 pm and 50 degrees, sunny.

Winter is here

In case you live in the balmy areas, this is what it looks like on a cold October morning in Idaho. The greenhouse garden has finally surrendered, no more zucchini, sniff sniff. When the temps in October dip like this, it's always a rude shock. Wait--wasn't it just 80 a couple weeks ago? What happened? Now it only gets up to low 50s on sunny days, and nights are frigid: it was 14 degrees last night, 14. Where did the warmth go? I want to follow it, like the birds.

These Pine Siskins came with a flurry of activity to snack on the sunflowers. Looks like a happy family.

Well, I didn't get a good shot of the upside-down antics, their acrobatic tricks would be better to watch in a video.
If I were them, I'd fly south in a hurry.

What on earth is a meme?

A meme is like an internet virus. It's an idea or activity that spreads from person to person, kind of like a chain letter, but without the bad luck.

Janeywan is passing one around that's fun so I thought what the hey, why not?

___________________________________________________________

• Grab the closest book.
• Turn to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence, (not the fifth line, the fifth sentence).
• Post the text of the next two to five sentences on your blog, along with these instructions.
• Make sure you choose the nearest book to you, not the dearest.
• Tag five others to do the same.
  ___________________________________________________________
  

Here are my results for this experiment:





I picked up The Middle Moffat, by Eleanor Estes, which Slammy just did book report on last night at the computer. It's one of my favoritest books of all time so I was excited to see what the quote would be.


The fifth sentence: Everybody sat down around the shiny round table in the dining room.



Ok, this sounds like a good beginning, I thought, but then...



Mrs. Stokes sat opposite Mr. Stokes. Beatrice sat on one side. And Nancy and Jane, best friends, sat on the other side.
First they had vegetable soup. They ate this all right.



Hmm, phooey, we don't get to hear about Jane's lamb chop dilemma. I had to read the rest of the chapter so I could enjoy it again. I think I will have to read the whole book again. I noticed that Estes uses very short sentences, maybe that's one of her secrets. If I could write like her, I'd be pleased as punch. But could I ever come up with characters like The Mechanical Wizard, or The Oldest Inhabitant? I don't know. That woman was a genius. And so was the illustrator, Louis Slobodkin.



Perhaps vegetable soup should be on the menu tonight.



I'm tagging the people in my blog list, have fun! Or not...

October Surprise

All tucked in for the night. Thanks to the Js for helping me so often with this task.

It's October, and the garden is still going strong. That's the surprise. Not only that, but the weather today is beeeauuuutiful.

The sunflowers are really shining now. The deer haven't been around to eat them lately, I'm not sure why.

The chickadees were out this morning, singing their wheezy little song.

Rusty wasn't too impressed. "Aaaah shaddup!"Clear and 67 degrees on the cold side of the house at 12:30 pm, it'll be around 80 later on.