First Day of Fall Follies

The weather is still warm but the calendar insists it's Fall, so I took pix of various fall activities, including a last shot of the flowerbed in front, which was quickly taken over by little neighbor wanting a picture of himself and balloon, about whom more in a bit.




The Korean soccer league was out in force in the park at the weekend, first big game, I think, complete with spectators and one baby and grandmother.




I didn't want to take the baby full face in case the grandmother might be upset, as I am a stranger, but I needn't have worried, she was thrilled! she was pointing out relatives to the baby as they played soccer, and the baby was quite unimpressed about them, though they were in fact pretty good players.




Hose bibs closed off for the season now, and faucets left open to avoid catastrophes over the winter. This townhouse has a very interesting design, in that the indoor valves that govern the outside faucets are carefully concealed, one under the back of the right hand side of the bathroom basin downstairs, the other in among the various pipes of the hot water heater upstairs, at the back, naturally, daring you to switch off the wrong supply. One good deed old timers do for new inhabitants is to explain all this to them!

Then there's a special tutorial on finding and replacing the TWO filters required for the furnace, again behind the furnace, concealed, to be inserted at a 30 degree, I am not kidding, angle both at once, if your arms are long enough to get around the furnace to do it.

More fun is the conversation with little Ken, the balloon owner up above, half Japanese, half American, whose English is coming along a treat. His parents are both musicians, highly talented folks, and Ken speaks Japanese to his mom, English to his dad, and if his Japanese is as funny as his English, is an endless source of joy.

The other day my neighbors on the other side, with husband at the other end of a cellphone, were attempting to clean the points on the pickup truck battery by pouring on water. Mother and daughter, this is. Father at other end of cellphone call, had omitted to suggest they cool the engine block off first. Result: big bang, and the engine died.

Ken had been sitting on his trike watching this with interest, and after the Big Bang, turned to them and said, you know that was quite funny!

and the other day I went off for my walk, and he nipped out of his house to inform me, thumb and two tiny fingers upraised, I'm three, see. Three, that's me! then on my way back again, he intercepted me and said, ah, you came back! I agreed that I had come back and he went on to observe, well, you just walk round and round then? couldn't deny it, really.

This is why we love this neighborhood!


Evenings here are quiet, since HP is usually asleep for the night by 8, after my working with him a couple of hours on evening care, leaving me a bit tired. I need to wake him at 10 for medication, so I occupy the intervening time myself, with various pursuits.

And since I can't spin all evening, tiring for my old mitts, and my creative juice kind of ebbs for the tapestry, also I would rather do it in daylight, I decided I had better have some knitting going too. So I used some of that harvested golden lambswool I bragged about in here ages ago, to cast on this scarf a couple of days ago.



One of those designs that is actually quite simple, yarnovers and drops and plain knitting, but it's treacherous, because as soon as you think you can do it without thinking, it goes wrong....like feather and fan, another "easy" pattern. Oh, Easy for Leonardo, to quote Dylan Thomas. Anyway, the color is perfect for fall, so I threw it down on the deck for its portrait to get that rustic atmosphere going.





All the houseplants are indoors now before we get a frost, and as usual amaze me by how much they grew this summer on the deck. The ficus tree is a few inches from the ceiling now. She's about 30 years old and still pretty happy.

And, great stroke of luck: at the dumpster I scored a load of firewood and a box of starters. Someone moving away, and that kind of thing is too expensive to move, also hazardous, I guess. Anyway, it's in storage for me out front now, yay. That and the little supply I keep in the car trunk, to keep it dry, not having a sheltered area for wood supplies.

These are Fall things to do. That and look out soup recipes.