"My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be." Robert Frost

Saturday Matt and I drove to a local farm stand (local...45 minutes away lol) to stock up on the things that our garden didn't provide: Acorn squash, butternut squash, garlic, pie pumpkins, and some Cortland apples (for sauce). This place is fantastic! The person who does the check-out is awesome: You put your items on the counter and he has every price for every item memorized, and faster than you could tally everything on a calculator he's tallied them (out loud). "Apples $15, 6 acorn at $1.25 is $22.25, 5 butternut at $1.25 is $28.50...."

Since I've been feeling out of sorts lately (I took a 3 hour nap this afternoon, on top of having slept 10 hours last night....I don't nap, ever), I've decided to do a mostly pictoral post.

Afterwards we continued on our way to the closest shopping area (ie. they have a Target, Ko.hls, Gap etc), an additional 15 minutes down the road (an hour away from our house). I needed to get some new long pj bottoms and Kohl.s had them on sale, mine have suddenly disappeared. I think my sister might have hijacked them, but neither of us can find them or remember.

I then proceeded to lose my cell phone. We're calling it and went back to where we had lunch, no one had see or heard it. We continued on our shopping trip figuring that it's gone: Oh well. It's not like it's an expensive phone. Matt kept calling the phone, not wanting to give up. Finally someone answered....it had fallen out of my pocket at lunch. Yay!

Went to Gap and found a halfway decent pair of jeans ($60). I hate spending that much on a pair of pants, but the last time I bought jeans was 3 years ago, and the thighs/crotch are threadbare. It amazes me how there are no wide-leg jeans ANYWHERE! Everything is bootcut or slimcut...with my hips that does NOT work. I ended up with "Essential" wide leg. I still can't believe that someone thinks $60 for a pair of pants is acceptable!

The other thing I can't believe is acceptable is how these teenagers are dressed! I saw on girl walking around with a skirt so short on that if she bent over or squatted even her entire derriere would be on display.

Then we saw a girl and boy (obviously boyfriend/girlfriend) and her proudly walking around with a Vi.ctoria's Se.cret bag: They couldn't have been more than 13 years old. WHAT THE HECK DOES SHE NEED ANYTHING FROM VICT.ORIA'S SECRETS FOR (besides the obvious boyfriend). They're too young to even know what the heck sex is! Matt and I don't get out much, but we just kept thinking where are these kids parents!

We got home from our excursion around 5:00pm or so...we would have a couple of hours of daylight left so we went out to split some wood: IT'S DONE! The entire load of logs is split! Now all we have to do is stack it: Yay! Now to give you an idea of this pile. It's over 6' high in the center and it's about 20' wide and 15' deep. Lots of wood. We were out there until it was too dark to see, but boy are we glad it's done.

This morning I had to go to work, but when I got home at 10:00am it was straight to work on all the stuff we got yesterday. I managed to cut up all of the squash, blanch them, bag them, and get it into the freezer. We now have about 4 gallon bags of cubed squash, 3 bags of squash halved, and 2 bags of squash bowls (just the part where the seeds were). I didn't do the apples because I was just too tired.

This pumpkin is the only one that is growing in our garden: The dangburn plant took up almost half of the garden and all we got was this one (small) pumpkin!

These are just some pictures of the colors around here. Unfortunately we've been getting a lot of rain the past few days and a lot of the leaves have already blown off the trees before they ever changed. I don't know if we're going to get a great show of color this year.

These are my clematis. I've never had any luck with clematis, I've always killed it. Well I had bought a little plant, put it in the front flower bed at the corner of the yard and forgot about it. Then I noticed that it was climbing the wires for the satellite dish: It has taken over and looks beautiful! I'm so happy that I've finally gotten one to live.

This is just a picture of our backyard from the upstairs hall window: It's not the greatest picture. The window is dirty and it isn't one that can be opened. The only way for me to clean the outside is to put a ladder up and go on the roof, not my cup of tea.

Well that is all that we've been up to.