Autumn Is Here (or How is it Mid-November?!)

 Matt pointed out these leaves during an afternoon walk on the southside.  10/30/2025

Matt raked a mountain of leaves on Saturday.  He bagged and stashed them behind the shed until they're needed to fed into the compost pile or mulch/top-dress the garden beds.  The whole garden is harvested now.  The carrots and bok choy were the last hold outs.  I'm still drying jalapeno and cayenne peppers.  Matt cooked down a yummy batch of tomatillo-tomato sauce.  We didn't have a great tomato harvest this year.  So it goes.  The peppers--sweet and spicy--were very prolific on the other hand.  That always makes me happy.  Peppers are my favorite.

Sarah and I had an amazing walk on the Rims on a glorious fall day.  Photo credit to my sister, Sarah.  11/1/2025

It has been a tremendously colorful, lovely fall.  The yellow trees and red shrubs were fabulous.  More than once the sunshine filtering through the colorful leaves would stop me in my tracks. A few times the trees basically demanded that I stop and take a photo.  The lone larch tree in our neighborhood has fully transitioned to gold.  There have been so many sunshiney, blue-skied autumn days. 

This is the only local larch tree I know about.  They're much more common in northwestern Montana.  Someday Matt and I hope to plant one at our place.  They're so cool.  10/29/2025

Daylight Saving Time ending is a mixed bag, but I enjoy catching more of the sunrise this month.  The pink clouds are a welcome part of my morning coffee.  Speaking of colorful skies, Matt and I also enjoyed a swell moment with the Northern Lights this week.  

The Northern Lights fill the sky over our house.  It was a pulsating raspberry streak of solar energy.  11/11/2025

The warm autumn days still lead to cool nights.  As a result, Ginger is enjoying the kick-off of Heat Vent Season.  She has a few comfy cat beds underneath the heat registers upstairs.  She loves to take naps under the wafting river of warm air.  She'll be hot to the touch and happy as a cat can be!

A view of town from the Rims during the walk with my sister.  11/1/2025

Matt and I are eagerly leaning into our slow season.  We have a blast trying to do everything and go everywhere during the summer months, but it is exhausting, too.  As autumn settles in, we settle down for what I call The Season of the S's.  Scrabble, soup, sweaters, shuffleboard, and staying home!   It has been so relaxing and mellow to have weekends at home for a change.   We've been home four weekends in a row, actually!  Since we weren't traveling, we were able to make fun plans at home.  We cooked a squash soup lunch (with soft pretzels) for my friend Dee Ann's birthday.  My sister came for a long weekend over Halloween.  We had soup and games with Mandy.  

Matt has been systematically perfecting his fresh pretzel game since we returned from Germany.

Speaking of soup, I made an especially excellent one on Sunday.  We love to make a big pot every weekend in the cooler months.  We take leftovers for lunch every day and soup goes a lonoooooog way.  Because we had so many humungous bok choy in the produce drawer, I cooked up an Asian-inspired, delicious, umami packed noodle soup.  Soup is so easy, adaptable, filling, and cheap.  It is one of my favorite parts of fall.

Matt spotted this Praying Mantis in the back garden.  10/26/20025

Weekend batch cooking is an even more useful time management strategy these days as our household adjusts to a change in schedule.  Because I started a new job in September!  After 18 years at the college/library, I decided to rock the boat and make a big change.  There were a lot of reasons.  I'd been considering it for a long time, waiting for the right opportunity to present itself.  And it did!  I'm now working for a family agriculture and environmental grassroots organization.  I feel like I'm rediscovering the path to what I originally intended.  My degree is in environmental studies/philosophy.  I just took a long (and fun) detour into librarianship.  I loved being a librarian, but I'm gonna love community organizing, too.  Quite a few of the skills overlap!  Last weekend, we held the annual, two-day meeting with our members from across the state.  It was a lot of work, but I thought my first annual meeting went really well!  I learned a lot.  I was helpful.  I met loads of wonderful people.

My new colleagues are a fun bunch of folks.  We had a 100% costume turnout.  Photo credit to Eric.  10/31/2025

Holy smokes 2025 went by fast!  How is it mid-November already?!  I better get cracking on my Christmas sewing/shopping/cooking plans!

The photo doesn't do the color of this tree justice.  It was positively glowing in the sun.  10/27/2025