M minus 2

It’s been a fine weekend and confirms my love of October. Today was the kind of day that makes fall the best season of all. It was bright, just a tad nippy out, and the leaves just had a hint of red and yellow to them. Foliage season is coming, but fall is definitely here.

As we did last year (see entries dated 24 Sep 2002 and 25 Sep 2002, The Socialist and I paid homage to autumn by heading out to one of my favorite farm stands and buying gourds. Our mission was to purchase gourds for the dinosaur bowl, as we did last year, but I kinda sorta overestimated the number of gourds we’d need.

The dragon bowl with this year’s gourds:

A look at the gourds in place on the hutch:



Extra gourds that I ended up putting in two other bowls in the hutch:



Still more gourds in a cut glass bowl that once belonged to my great-grandmother:

That last picture also happens to show the new end table that The Socialist recently purchased for our living room. The large dragonfly bowl on the bottom tier was a Christmas present from The Socialist to me a couple of years ago. I love the way it looks on the frosted glass lower shelf.

The glass pitcher? Uh … remember the woman I mentioned a couple of weeks ago who was throwing all sorts of apparently perfectly good things into the dumpster? I got curious. I had to check the stuff out, especially that dry bar she dragged halfway across creation. Anyhow, there, inside the dumpster, was a really nice looking glass pitcher. It was just out of my reach, but The Socialist assisted in extracting it from the debris. There wasn’t a nick or imperfection on it. The pitcher is now mine.

Notice, by the way, the glimpse of Cattitude in the cat bed right by the end table.

This cat bed does not belong to Cattitude. It belongs to O’Beast. That bed has been the poor O’Beast’s for at least six years. The Elder sister purchased it as a Christmas present for him, and he took immediately to it. He frequently retreats to it for cat naps and for a comfortable place to rest as he stares out the glass doors, watching the world go by. Or, more accurately, it is where he used to do these things. Cattitude decided that the cat bed was hers, and that, apparently, was that. The Socialist moved the bed away from the glass doors in the kitchen out to the living room area, where Cattitude prefers to emulate a meatloaf. O’Beast has been reduced to this:

So, as I washed and arranged gourds, Cattitude napped in the living room and O’Beast watched from the kitchen in his poor, undersized bed that was purchased for Cattitude but apparently was not good enough for Her Highness. Kitten, however, was not in any way, shape nor form interested in playing. She was far more interested in what lay behind door number one:

She can’t get all the cabinet doors open in the kitchen, but I know for a fact she can manage three of them. The other two idiots can manage the kitchen cabinet doors as well, but are intelligent enough not to do so in front of me. They are also intelligent enough not to jump on top of high pieces of furniture so they can graze on my ornamental wheat if I am watching them.

The chair in the foreground? That’s where I was sitting. The window sill to the left of the chair? That was Kitten was hanging out, making a minor nuisance of herself. The blinking cursor, the moving mouse, the ring on my finger, the cord on my camera: These were all fair game. Then the little grey moron noticed the ornamental wheat. Now I had placed the ornamental wheat there because I was sure there was no way she’d be able to get at it there. She got at it when I had it on top of the dry sink, so I moved it to the top of the tall bookcase. She got at it on top of my tall bookcases downstairs so I moved it to the top of the curio cabinet next to my secretary desk. She got at it on top of the curio cabinet so I put it on top of my computer desk. I was sure there was no way she’d be able to get to it up there. Even if she attempted to jump up from the desk to the top, the jump was simply too vertical to manage. She wouldn’t have enough of an angle to manage actually getting to the top of the cabinet itself. I forgot about the window sill though.

I also purchased some Indian corn for the front door at the farm stand where we got the gourds. I found a nice set of three ears of Indian corn, one red, one pale yellows and pinks, and one with blues and purples. I also ran across this set of mini-corn, and had to have it:

If the color on your monitor is anything like the color on my monitor, then this picture very closely approximates the actual color of the kernels of corn. I have never before seen naturally silver corn before. This was the only set they had at the farm stand; I suspect it was because any others were already sold. It is quite eye-catching, unlike any Indian corn I’d ever seen before. I haven’t decided what I’ll be doing with it yet, but I’m leaning toward putting it on the door to my office