Fall is Here!

Fall is officially here.  The leaves are turning and there is a crispness to the air that refreshes the soul and an Autumn light that makes every one's completion look good.  I love this time of year here.  We never really had a Fall season in the bay area. It was like someone flipped a switch on October 31, all the leaves dropped off the trees and on November 1 it started raining.  Here Autumn is a longer passage.  Right now the leaves are really yellow, orange and a little bit of red.  Not many of the leaves are falling yet, but there is a trickle of leaves that make a tittering noise as they filter through the branches to the ground.  We take a walk in the afternoons up the "Gulch" near our home and it's truly lovely.

I have been harvesting our garden, canning and getting ready for the cold weather.  We have had a few days of frost and our garden looks a little bleak around the edges.  The tomatoes are gone and the squash.  We have yet to dig up the sweet potatoes. The cabbages, carrots, beets, onions and spinach are doing well.  Hoping to hold out for the fall a little longer before we have to put the garden to rest.  

We tried introducing the chicks, who are now looking more adolescent than like chicks, to the rest of the chickens.   It did not go well.  We are now down to 3 chicks.  Not sure what happened, but our rooster, "Bob Noxious", got after one of them. He is normally a fairly gentle rooster. However, chickens have a brain about the size of a chickpea and it's difficult to figure out why they do what they do.  It would be just our luck that all of the remaining chicks are going to be roosters....jeeze.  

We went to the local Volunteer Fire Department spaghetti feed yesterday.  It really was kind of cool to show up and see so many of our neighbors.  We actually new people. We sat with the new pastor, his wife and children.  They are really great people and not hypocrites, which is terribly refreshing after our experience with our last church.  It's starting to feel like we are part of this community.  We had a nice time and that spaghetti wasn't bad either.