Sidetracked Charley

  Indian Summer always feels like extra time; a pause between summer and winter. Like spring fever it makes me lazy. I want to linger on the deck mostly cleared of deck chairs. I look at the hoses and think I need to get them rolled up and stored. But there is still time. I lie. Every day of sun is borrowed and so much remains to be done. The firewood has not been stacked. Not my job this year, part of the price, but if it does not get staked before winter it is me that has to dig it out from under the snow. I got the electric snow thrower ordered and assembled and sitting in the studio while I decide where to store it. If the wood was stacked it would be in the wood shed on the front row. I need to take care of the list. It is not like I have not been busy. Lots to do. Facebook gave me extra time by throwing me in jail for seven days. But it seemed to announce it was time to clean up my internet schedule. I deleted a lot of unused apps on my smart phone. Went through my photo file...

Aspens turning on distant mountains Google has given up fonts with serifs. I remember those days with the calligraphy pen practicing the strokes which so naturally gave you serifs. I think I first did that in the seventh grade. I was so proud when I got it right. Now it seems kids do not even learn cursive in school.  And to be honest I love Arial with no serifs the most of all fonts. And my cursive daily looks more like printing. I must acknowledge Penelope, my roommate in college, who taught me prep school script which was actually printing. I practiced it in my first ever journal. I have a shelf on a book case which contains all the journals I have managed to keep before Y!360 and my first every on line journal. I still love journals and buy them. I have four currently with a page or more written in them. There is the garden journal which I am religious about only in the spring. Time to update it. And then there is my ceremony journal in which I keep records of ...

And then the leaves were gone The lone tree on the hill was glorious last year but this year it seemed to suffer from the drought. By itself on the hill you could see so clearly that its leaves were smaller and its foliage less dense. The monsoon rains came in September in earnest and while they were nice in the amount they were late. Late for almost everything important like trees and deer. First year I saw fawns with spots in October. Almost as if the does had waited and rushed to reproduce when it will be too late for their offspring to survive the winter. Maybe even the fall. It has been a rough fall. Temperatures have been lower than usual and the golden trees few and sometimes far between. Like the lone tree on the hill few reached peak color before dropping all their leaves. Summer came late and left early. Fall just could not seem to make up its mind. Grove of gold I was surprised last week to find this grove of aspen in glorious color. They had stayed greenish fo...