Ahhhhhhh

Planned a long day at home today, just sitting and playing with the Toast (our nickname for T is T___ Toast, or the Toaster, or sometimes just "Toast"...). Well, that and soup, which I'll get to in a minute. So imagine my surprise when, on a mission of mercy to Meijer, Hubby calls and says "do you want to go to the DIA (the Art Museum) with my parents?". I LOVE the DIA...so of course I said yes.

Then I started to think.

If Hubby and Toast went with mom and dad, I could have a minimum of three hours. THREE HOURS of completely unadulterated SILENCE and peace. It started to give me the twitches just thinking about it.

I broke the news slowly to Hubby: "Hey...so....uh....I have this pot of soup on...do you think, maybe...uh...you and Toast could to to the museum and I would stay here, you know, for a little me time?" And this, my friends, is why I love him: "Sure! We could do that"

Joy! Rapture!

So they tromped off to get cultured, and while I am very very sad at missing time with my In-laws (who I love) and the Monet/Dali exhibit (which I really want to see), I also was overjoyed at having my whole entire house to myself.

Of course, a good amount of time was spent finishing the soup task I mentioned earlier. My mom and her friend took the turkeys they raise in to the Happy Turkey Hunting Grounds this week, and I was presented with two fresh turkeys (20 lbs and 24 lbs, I think), all cut up (because really, when do three people eat a 20 lb turkey?) and with carcasses in tact. I brought out my huge gazillion-quart canning pot and worked up a little homemade turkey stock magic with the non-roastable parts and the veggies (it's a secret mix...sorry). Okay...small exaggeration. It's an enamel pot that will boil seven quart jars of spaghetti sauce or whatever else your canning. So thats...what, a million quarts? We had six quarts of stock, three had meat in them, for freezing; plus a two cup plastic food container full, and fed all four and a half of us and have leftovers. Put that with the chicken stock I made a few weeks ago and we are stocked with stock now. Hooray! Oh, and the soup was great, I added meat (deboned what there was plus threw two wings in there for extra, so there was plenty), carrots, cannelinni beans, corn and spinach. With a loaf of yummy bread it was a great dinner.

I got a whole scrapook page done today..well a two page spread... I consider this a day well spent.

Fall

I have always loved autumn. It's one of the reasons I like living in Michigan, because the colors here are spectacular. Sure, it's no eastern Seaboard, no tiny town in Vermont surrounded by mountains, but it's what I love. I love the light that comes with autumn...the sky looks different, it's bluer somehow. The sunlight is different than in the middle of summer. I know the scientific reasons for this, but still it never ceases to amaze me to look outside my window and see that perfect golden day that happens every October or so...the one that makes you think "I'd like to wear corduroys and go to the cider mill today".

The house we live in now has an added advantage. This tree, above, is just magnificent in the fall. Seriously, on a cloudy, rainy day the thing practically creates it's own light. It's a Japanese Maple that was here when we moved in...and given the landscaping disasters the previous homeowners left us with, I seriously doubt it was their doing.

Living in our neighborhood presents a sort of game with Mother Nature every fall. We are surrounded by trees here. Lots of them. Our yard consists mainly of Oaks, which are beautiful and provide a lot of shade. They also hang on to their leaves like noting I've ever seen. So every year about this time we start to wonder...should we rake? If we rake too early, more leaves fall and the leaves in the yard to the north of us always blow onto our lawn...meaning more work. If we wait too long everything gets wet then snowed on and the job in the spring is tantrum-worthy. After four years, I'm starting to learn how things go. Trees start to turn. Then the Japanese maple turns and is a brilliant red-orange for about three days, then some big windstorm comes along and it loses all it's leaves. Then this will happen:
These are our burning bushes. They are just starting to "burn" right now. I've learned that if we wait until they are totally red before starting to rake, we're pretty safe. If they've dropped their leaves, even better.
That is, of course, if it doesn't rain....which is another problem entirely.