And I cast on a vanilla sock. The photo is from when we went to town on Sunday. Isn't the blue fantasstic?
One of the gals (redheadedstitcher24) I follow on Instagram decided to do a No New Starts November and I saw this as a great opportunity to really focus on my One Piece project. However, I also wanted to work on Sweatervest Weather in November, too. So I decided to start a couple things right before November when she reminded me of the start things early work-around.
Then on Friday there was blue skies ... and snow ...
Saturday I woke up to a beautiful day.
Crazy how that happens sometimes. I was, however, eager to see the snow melt. No snow until Thanksgiving, I say.
Like I said, it was a beautiful day. Wet, but beautiful.
My husband and I spent a good chunk of the day working on the wood project. He was cutting and stacking, I was splitting. I took a look at the pile, with the early morning sun shining on it, and thought it was a pretty shot.
Back to the Mickey Mouse boots. They are a wonderful invention
They are a military boot. They are probably one of the best things to have if you live in colder climates.
I pulled them out of storage this weekend so my feet would stay warm and dry while we were working outside. Hopefully I won't need them again until December. One can hope.
After supper I opted to go out and split more wood for an hour and a half, or so. ... When I was done, I shut off the log splitter, turned around and may have gasped when I saw the sunset.
Sunday I woke up to a dreary, grey day.
And also to my husband insisting I go outside and have a mini photoshoot and that it didn't matter that I was still in my pajamas.
I split 99 percent of the wood in this round stack (holzhausen) and he wanted a record of it. This was the first time we tag-teamed on the cutting, stacking and splitting of the wood and got this round stack done in a week. It's a four-cord pile and a year's worth of heat.
Yes, I just posted a photo of myself in my PJs on the Interwebs. ... I look cute, though.
Sunday afternoon we wrapped up the round stack and we had our son come out and take a few photos of us. I think my husband was really proud of how much I contributed to the building of this round stack. Bonus: I never once whined!
The stack is 12-feet around and 5 feet tall. It's our biggest one! In three to five years it will be ready to burn.
Look! Mickey Mouse boots!
And then to wrap this one up, one of the new stitchy friends I've made recently loves chickens! Yay!
She was happy to see the video I posted last week of the ladies working on their jack-o-lantern. I pulled together some video clips I took over the last few weeks and loaded them to the YouTube.
Snow is coming, or so *they* say. I guess I'll believe it when I see it. And maybe cry a little. Snow shouldn't happen until Thanksgiving, in my humble opinion.
"Where have you been?" you are probably asking. Or not.
Well, nothing to terribly exciting. Fall chores. Morning walks in the woods ... you know, the usual.
I've woken up twice now to frosty mornings.
Photos taken during one of my morning walks on one of the frosty days.
I've had some beautiful morning walks. The walking keeping me warmish, of course.
You can't beat some of these sights.
Yes, morning walks in the woods to collect/swap out SD cards for the game cams. The rut is on, but I haven't seen too much on the cameras. I sat out last weekend and I didn't see anything but turkeys.
So that was fun.
The other big thing that has been going on is cutting, splitting and stacking wood.
I can't believe the last time I wrote I didn't mention the wood delivery. I think it was back in September my hubby said something like "Should we get a load of wood delivered?" I immediately said yes.
Quite frankly I like the security of having plenty of wood for the winters. Yeah, it's work to get it prepared and ready to burn, and I might whine once or twice, but I know the work is worth it.
This is the first year I've really shared the work load of loading the cut wood, splitting and stacking. I hate stacking. I over think it when it's time for placing the wood in the round piles. My husband doesn't mind it and he's pretty quick at it. So we've got a system. Cut and load wood in the trailer. Haul it to where we are stacking, and I split it. Depending on where we are in the stacking cycle, I either help or I fill in the center. It might sound convoluted while I'm explaining it, but it works. We are tearing through the wood pile pretty quickly. That may slow down now that the weather is starting to misbehave.
One neat thing about splitting wood is seeing the interesting textures in the wood grains.
This must be where a limb was. I don't think I've ever seen such tight curling in the grain.
This makes me think of staples of sheep's wool.
This is the most recent wood pile we are working on. I took the day off work yesterday and spent the morning splitting wood.
A few weeks ago I took this video of myself. Partly to get used to recording myself. Which seems like a weird thing, all around. BUUUUUTTTT ... if I'm going to get really comfortable making craft vlogs I figure I need to do what I can to get a good video presence, right?
I also made the video on the off chance that it will help encourage someone who needs a bit of a nudge and a "Hey, you *can* do this," if "stinking thinking" might be holding them back from something they want to do, but were afraid to try.
Fun things ... my son and his girlfriend carved pumpkins. They turned out cute.
After a few people sent me links to chickens carving pumpkins I decided to let my girls have a try at it. It did not go as expected. Success in the end, however. Not to mention all the fun they had once they decided they were going to do it.
There is something about seeing a toothless jack-o-lantern.
Yeah, those girls ... they sure know how to have fun and hold late night parties. Ha!
Last week I had a work thing to go to. I wasn't really feeling it this go round, unfortunately for all those around me. I was quiet and didn't speak much.
I left the house around 6 a.m. and this is what it looked like most of the way.
The sunrise was pretty. I didn't dare try to take a photo.
Thank goodness for knitting during the downtimes.
Yup, that's my Bly Cardigan. I'm making slow progress.
Let's see ... what else ... Oh yeah, the snow I alluded to in the title. The weather people in my area are telling us we could have a snowy Halloween. As long as there isn't a Halloween blizzard like there was decades ago.
I'm not really ready for the snow. Am I ever fully ready? No ... I keep thinking of things I should take care of and get done, out and about. I've been watching videos of a gal who is living off grid in a camper up in Nova Scotia. The auto-played videos are of her dealing with the winter and I think it's sort of getting me ready for the idea of snow. One night one of her videos was of a snow storm and my hubby and I think it affected us subconsciously because we made a fire in the wood stove and then was too warm for the rest of the night.
One of my Christmas cactus' started blooming. Maybe it is a Thanksgiving cactus?
Today I set it in front of the door and some of the babies came to the front door and one looked way too interested in it.
Well, at the risk of making the blog entry *too* photo dense I suppose I better stop now. I'm cautiously optimistic I will make a crafting vlog/floss tube this week. I need to sit down and write some show notes because I have no idea what's going on.
Oh, but I will leave you with this tidbit. Speaking of crafts and hobbies.
Oh yeah. One other thing. If you look to the right side of the blog you will see you can now sign up to have blog posts sent to your inbox. I used to have something on the blogher network, or something. Then it shut down and I've been keeping my eyes open for something to replace it. Looks like blog posts get sent to you the next day. If you don't mind the delay it works great.
Over the past few weeks I've been slowly ripping out the garden.
I left the broccoli and whatever flowers there were, for the pollinators.
I thought I had taken photos when I was cleaning out, but I did not. Instead my phone was being used as a radio. I did catch this bumble bee clinging to one of the remaining cosmos.
This year was a first for collecting seeds for hollyhock, calendula and a few other flowers that I started from seed in the last couple of years and some were volunteers.
Okay, so I've been gradually cleaning out the garden, leaving things out there for as long as possible. I'm in Zone 3b/now 4a.
Last week I ended up ripping out everything, digging up the onions (the harvest was a joke/disappointment this year. Carrots are still out there. I'll dig those up next month before the ground completely freezes up.
I harvested the last of the tomatoes and will let them ripen in the house.
So the garden is pretty much empty. I realize I keep saying this, but it's true, except for the flowers.
The flowers I left are by the garden gate, where I'm standing to take this photo, and behind me.
Also, how beautiful are those trees with the sun beams coming through?
I think it was that night my son was outside, over by the garden, and came running back to the house, asking if it was all right that the chickens were in the garden. I didn't give it much thought, actually, I said it was fine, cause it was. They couldn't do any damage on what was left in there. It was just some flowers, ground cherries and broccoli plants.
Well, that one is on me. Cause the deer discovered the garden was open and ate everything that was left. Seriously. They ate all the flowers. The mowed down what was left of the broccoli, the lone jalapeño plant that was in there. Hollyhocks. I'm still shaking my head over that one. They ate a whole hollyhock plant.
They also ate the milkweed that was outside of the garden.
I was like "Wow, really?" Guess nothing for the pollinators and the milkweed seeds were mown down, too.
I made sure the gate was closed after that. Though that's kind of like closing the barn door after the cows get out, right?
We had one last thing in the garden area that is precious and that is our pear tree.
Since I have been all over the place this past summer I don't think I wrote too much about the pear tree that my husband hand pollinated with apple blossoms. This is the pear tree my sister-in-law gave us. It fruited for the first time and we had 13 pears on there. We were determined to keep those pears.
A day or two later my husband and I were out by the garden and I was showing him all that I got done and we were just walking around.
I don't recall if it was me or him who spotted the blow out in the garden fence.
We both said "What the heck happened?" He said it had to have been a deer breaking through.
You'll notice that it is right next to the pear tree.
Those bratty deer were bound and determined to get our pears. Have you ever heard of such a thing? The fencing is high enough that it can't be just jumped over, either.
Somehow those deer got in to the garden and ate the pears and then burst through the fence.
Oh, but wait, there was one pear left, we saw. So we decided to just go ahead and pick it. So we walked around to the gate and stopped short.
This one didn't photograph as well. The deer pushed in the gate until it opened and walked in to the garden.
The gate was all pushed in and the fence posts are kinda jacked up.
While I was assessing the damage to the gate and how I could get it closed again, my hubby went and picked the pear and took a bite out of it. He then said I *had* to try it, as this was the sweetest pear he had ever had.
I took a bite and had to agree that it was THE BEST pear I had ever eaten. It was *so* super sweet, without being sugary sweet. And juicy ... yeah ...
I ate almost the whole thing and fully understood why the deer were bound and determined to break in to the garden so they could get the pears.
We will need to do some reading to see what other steps we can take to further safeguard to pear tree next year.
