Saturday, October 31, 2009, 03:53
Blustery Day
Winter must be on its way. I baked my first batch of lefse Friday evening while the wind howled outside and the wind chimes clanged merrily.
Baking lefse was just as I remember -- a floury mess.
The lefse was just as I remember, too -- yummy!
In the end, the floury mess is worth having a batch of lefse wrapped up in a white cotton dishtowel to cool.
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Friday morning started out very warm, with a temperature of almost 60 degrees. About mid-morning, the wind really kicked up and it was “snowing” leaves everywhere. The air was full of yellow leaves that had been blown off the trees. It grew steadily colder all day, although not tremendously cold.
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I have to confess that I am not looking forward to the end of Daylight Saving Time Saturday night. I am already thinking that it gets dark much too early. I cannot say that I am already thinking that the sun is setting too early because we have only seen the sun a couple of times in October. The rest of the time has been cloudy or rainy. Rain is good, though.
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This was a tough week. I found out on Monday that a fellow journalist, a man who had been associated with the county newspaper for more than 56 years, had passed away in his sleep. He was 84 and still working, and still just as sharp as he ever was. I liked him very much. He was the quintessential editor. He was at work last Friday, and when he failed to show up for work Monday morning, others from his office went to his house to see if he was all right. I wanted to pay my respects and went to his funeral on Friday.
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Seems hard to believe that Halloween is upon us. And once that is past, we will be hit with the "Christmas season" in full force. Never mind that Thanksgiving is still a few weeks away. I bought a black witch's hat with black feathers so I could have a "costume" for a craft sale on Saturday. Clever, huh? Right. . .
LeAnn R. Ralph
Sunday, October 25, 2009, 06:28
Wasps and Snow
The number of wasps that have found their way into my house this year is incredible. They are especially bad in our walk-out basement.
Before I reach for the feed scoop, a bag of horse feed, the cat food, kitty water containers, kitty food dishes, the broom, the dust pan, horse buckets or to water my plants, I look for wasps. I have found wasps on each of these things, crawling along, looking malevolent in the way that is unique to wasps. Fortunately, because it has been rather cold, they are slow.
I have found wasps upstairs, too. One day when I opened a box of books I had ordered, I was about to reach inside the box when Randy said, "Watch out! A wasp!"
I have no idea how the wasp got into the box.
One evening there was a wasp hanging around the clean dishes in the dish drainer, too.
I am getting rather good at killing wasps. I generally believe that all creatures deserve to live their lives just as I deserve to live mine, but I apparently do not believe this when it comes to wasps. I seem to be even more tolerant of the Multi-colored Asian Lady Beetles than I am of wasps. We have not had many lady bugs yet this year, but maybe that will change. The weather has been too cold and wet so far for the lady bugs to swarm. Only one day earlier this past week when it managed to get to 60 degrees Fahrenheit in the afternoon did we see a moderate number of lady bugs.
Snow
Once again, we have had snow on the ground. It rained most of the morning on Friday, and then in the afternoon, gradually, almost imperceptibly, the rain changed over to snow. By the time I was ready to leave the newspaper office, it was snowing at a pretty good clip, a heavy, wet sort of snow.
Friday evening while we were outside with Pixie, we heard loud snaps and cracks coming from the woods. It was the sound of tree branches breaking off. I suspect, actually, that it was the sound of dead tree branches breaking off from the weight of the snow. It didn't seem to be enough snow hanging on the trees to break off living branches.
I suppose, because of the rain, we had gotten earlier in the week (another inch!) that the dead wood was saturated with water. The combination of rain in the morning and wet snow in the afternoon probably saturated the branches even more, so that once they had a little bit of snow hanging on them, it created a tipping point -- and crack, snap.
The weather remained chilly on Saturday with only a small amount of sunshine in the morning. Then the sky grew hazy again. It has been an unusually cold, cloudy, snowy October. October often is a mild month around here, or if it turns out to be a colder October, it tends to have more sunshine than we've had lately.
Many of the trees have already lost their leaves. Some of them never turned colors at all and just dropped their leaves still green. Of those that did manage to turn, the colors are muted shades of yellow and rust. The bigger lilacs in the backyard still have their leaves, but the smaller lilac close to the house has lost most of its leaves.
Many of the corn fields and soybean fields around here are still not harvested. The weather has been far too cold and wet for the crops to dry very much. It would take a week of sunny and somewhat warmer weather to dry out the fields, I think.
I am wondering if the wetter weather pattern this month means that the six-year drought has finally broken. Time will tell.
LeAnn R. Ralph