Yes, we do have bananas, and fungi

Yesterday's walk involved interesting fungi, sign of fall. This is one I like a lot, the reddish cap and the lime green gills. Seen from above it looks as if someone dropped a bun

My little books of mushrooms yielding nothing on this pretty common mushroom, I searched online and here it is, all labeled, and a much better picture.

From Russia, huh? Wonder how it traveled here. 

I do like to know what I'm admiring. Near here there's a park, Marquand Park, I expect Inger knows it,  which was originally a private garden , filled with collected specimen trees and shrubs, all with little metal labels, very satisfying.  It's open to the public for study and strolling, an excellent use of great wealth, I'd say.

There's a kind of story that Adam's first job in Eden was to name everything. I doubt it, I doubt Eden except as a metaphor, but I sympathize with the naming urge. 

What are all these things, Eve? We have to name them or how can we manage, can't keep saying look out for that long patterned sliding animal wrapped around that tall brown thing with green things hanging from it and round things to eat.  

So he named snake, tree, apple and it may not, looking back, have been a wise decision. So when it all went wrong and they were evicted,  he promptly blamed it all on Eve.  

Anyway on the way home, I noticed the neighbor's Mexican sunflower, tithonia, doing well. 

I've grown them in the past and they have a hard time with rain and wind, the stems being fragile, but lovely while they last.

Back to the present, after months of Misfit shopping and the local farm, I noticed I hadn't had bananas, nor banana bread, for months, tropical fruit not being a feature of either place.

So I made a small shopping trip, and yes, we now have banana, walnut, cranberry bread. Great for breakfast, afternoon tea, any old time really.  

Gary having gone away yet again to Florida, who knows when he'll be back, he's missing out on this one.  He was making the usual last minute arrangements before traveling. 

Being Gary this involved buying new plants he couldn't resist, they were a bargain (!), celosia, arranging for me to house his elephant plant on my step, to accept s few eggs he couldn't finish before he left, one neighbor to water out back, another to water in the house and out front. I expect he eventually packed some clothes.  

I'll also bet any money he forgot about the watering and turned off the water.. wouldn't be the first time. Anyway he's gone, leaving the neighborhood exhausted. I miss him though, not that I see him much to talk to, but it's nice to know he's around.

Then I embarked on another pair of socks while I decided what to make next. This is the kind of yarn painted to be self patterning, ss you see.

The yarn doesn't look like more than a variegated type, but it's very interesting to knit up and see the pattern emerge. 

It makes you look like a great colorwork knitter without needing the skills of working yarns in both hands, managing floats on the wrong side, all that. 

Floats are the loops of yarn carried across the back of color work, which need skilled management so they don't pucker up the design.

Anyway, here's the wrong side of self patterning yarn

Cool, no? It keeps you knitting just to see what emerges. Really the pattern is knitting the knitter, rather than the other way round.

And I cast on both socks, from one ball of yarn, one from the center, one from the outside. 

This saves carting two skeins around and keeping them untangled.

This morning I finished the outside of the jigsaw puzzle which I was fiddling with last evening, seeing how near i was, why wasn't it working, until I went to bed, thinking it was a mystery.

This morning I noticed a piece under my chair. So I inserted it and aha! done. If I were a preacher I bet I could compose a snappy little sermon on this. 

How we're all searching for that last little piece to make life perfect, then we find it and we see it's only the framework, etc.  

Not that anyone would listen, but isn't that the fate of preachers, after all! Yes, this is a little legpull for the couple of preachers who read in here, couldn't resist. 

And here's a piece of art which looks like maybe 1930s,40s, but look at the date

Happy day everyone, keep on, seeing what patterns emerge from our days, sometimes surprising.

Ukraine racks up more regained territory, very timely to keep Europe's support, now that Russia is cutting off fuel as winter is coming on.