A quiet week

So what do you write when everything is normal?

Don't get me wrong. Normality is good; it's restful. But same old just doesn't have the zip that new, exciting adventures do.

The first thing I do is go out and take pictures in the garden. You are looking at a photo of a daddy long legs strolling on the leaves of a purple cone flower. I always thought that they were black. This one is light brown.

The weather here is been fine. After one of the wettest Octobers on record, November has been dry, sunny and mild. That has helped a lot. Trees have been dropping their leaves like it was autumn (it is.) The dry spell has let me catch up with clearing some of the gardens of leaves. That has its objectionable parts too. See my post before this one.

The weather has some plants confused. I found a daisy, a spring bloomer in a protected spot around the Master Gardener project I work (Curran Hall.) Spider wort is reblooming and the Indian blanket flowers and zinnias in my last post are still brightening the landscape. A couple of daffodils have stuck their noses out of the dirt. That is not all good. Even though daffies have some antifreeze in their sap, a hard freeze will kill them and diminish their normal, spring glory.

Our local news is full of the trial of the man accused (now convicted) of raping and murdering a very nice young reporter, Anne Presley. I thought it was just here colleagues on the station where she worked, but every station is full of it tonight. There are a lot of things happening here in Arkansas. I think that too much time is spent, not just on the trial, but on retrospectives of her life. She was, as I said, a nice girl. Her death is a useless tragedy. It seems to me that all of this attention is slightly morbid and does not serve the community as news.

My office is piled knee-high with stuff to be sorted. Some should be tossed, some sent to storage and some shelved where I can get to it. Maybe next week.

I bought a copy of "The Oxford English Dictionary Thesaurus" last week. After studying it for several days, I still can't find the words I want. The thing consists of two large books and a poster sized guide to the thesaurus. Words are listed in groupings like society, animal and the like. But the poster seems to have different group numbers than the guide book, which has different numbers than the actual thesaurus. It's a disappointment. I do so love dictionaries.

I once bought an English Swahili dictionary. It was a theory of mine that Edgar Rice Burroughs used Swahili for the language of the great apes. Looks like I was wrong. Oh well. We learn as much from failed experiments as we do from those whose results agree with our predictions.

apologies to Kurt Weil

Oh it is garden time

From May to December.

But the leaves fall down

When it is September.

And the golden leaves

Are blown all around.

It is time to rake

and a leaf pile make.

If you couldn't guess from the last two photos and the pastiche of September Song, I raked leaves most of today. Part of them are mulched and placed around winter sensitive plants and the rest are still piled, like the song says.

I left them on the lawn so the neighbor kids could jump in them and not get hurt. The ones I mulched were on the driveway and that concrete skins knees when roughly contacted.

Leaf raking is a restful way to spend a pretty day. The weather was wonderful and the autumn flowers were happily blooming in our garden. The first four pictures are variations of the Indian blanket flower. That is usually a summer bloomer. Our fall weather has been so mild that they have continued apace.

The three photos before the leaves are a whirling butterfly guara, pineapple sage and a cosmo.

The birds were singing too. Even the crows seemed to be trying to caw musically. Lovely day, somewhat dusty, but really terrific.