All my best memories of my childhood in Upstate are cloaked in the lengthening shadows of autumn.  Although the cooler climate of the Great Lakes is particularly attractive to a southern dweller in the height of our brutal summers, if you get a chance to go to the New England (and I don’t care a whit about the classification of NY as a “mid-atlantic” state, Upstate NY is most definitely New England), brave the chill and go in the fall. 

I arrived home from DC to a cold snap in Arkansas, and the red and orange leaves glint through the windows of my office.  In the evening from my front porch, the pungent smells of woodsmoke and wet leaves carry me back through the years if I close my eyes.

Missing is the sweet sharp smell of the apple presses and cedar, and the faint clear smell of the coming snows coming with the wind from the lake, blowing back my hair and biting my ears.  Missing is the achingly beautiful deep evergreens among the scarlet sugar maples and the golden paper birch, the colors disappearing a little each day until only the dark green remains, standing sentinel against the new silver of the early morning frost on the skeletons of the softwoods.  Missing also is that frost on the windows where I scratched my name as I competed with my brothers for footspace against the heat registers in the frigid mornings of our underheated house.  

Since developing reactive arthritis in  my mid-20’s, I cannot tolerate the cold.  My hands ache more now than they did in the days when I could play for hours in the early snows and never feel the cold, listening to the honking of geese in huge black V’s winging south over the sky.  On mornings like these, I stand for stolen moments in the shower, shamefully wasting water as I hold my hands to the hot spray so that I can button my shirt without pain.  And yet the chill wind passing over my cheek bones never fails to bring the warmest memories of my home.

I cannot convey to you the smells and the sounds of New York in the full glory of autumn.  But I can give you a glimpse of my memories.

Against my usual practice, I direct-linked these photos to give proper credit.  They can all be found here.

They change constantly, and may be as ephemeral as the season itself.  Go and see them before the winter sets in and that blaze of color is a memory of another fall passed.

I have to make a shameless plug.

My wonderful sister, Jess, who reads my blog, on my birthday sent me one of these:

This is the bomb.

If you have never really tried loose-leaf tea, you have not really appreciated tea.  But loose leaf, as superior to tea bag tea as it may be, it’s not, well, quite as portable.

This is a little personal tea pot that not only brews, but strains your tea.  Add loose leaf and hot water, and let steep.  You then set the pot on top of your favorite mug and it strains the tea directly into your mug. Rinse.  Repeat.

I keep this one at work, and I am so very in love, I just may have to buy another for home.

And while you are at it, Adagio’s Jasmine #12 is fabulous.  I was introduced to jasmine tea on my prom night at Trader Vic’s and it has reminded me of innocence ever since.

(PS – If you want to try an Ingenuitea of your very own, leave a comment and I will send you a $5 email gift certificate to Adagio teas.)

Know before you go.

One thing I am passionate about, if you agree with my politics or not, is the provision of tools for an involved and informed electorate.  

The above site is maintained by a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization.  If you enter your address, it will give you a sample ballot including all the referenda and candidates for your particular voting ward.

The sample ballot contains links to position statements for all the candidates on the ballot and detailed explanations of the referenda.

Want a shortcut? www.vote-xx.org – enter your two-letter state abbreviation for the xx, and it will take you straight to the website for your state.

Just another bit of lagniappe provided to you by the good people of My Level.

Now that I am back on my feet, I have to take some satisfaction that my period of indisposition wasn’t a complete waste of time.  

Behold my first garment:

Excuse the crappy photo taken from my iPhone and the oh-so-lovely towel backdrop (I was blocking the sweater at the time I took the photo).  It’s a pretty simple sweater as sweaters go; it’s knit in one piece and is sleeveless to go over another long-sleeved shirt.  But it fits me, and I made a whole garment from string.  FROM STRING I TELL YOU!*

Knitting is just freaking magic.

 

 

*Hats and socks are not garments – they are accessories and therefore do not count in my “garment” paradigm.

…that whole primal scream therapy concept sounds like such a reasonable and rational idea.

I want to state this now:

I do not handle passive-aggressive management techniques well.

And I will paradoxically stop there.

We interrupt this blog for breaking news:

I have:  A fibula that appears to have bone in all the appropriate and expected places.

I do NOT have: A brace, cast or other implement of torture designed to seriously limit my choices of footwear.

And the heavens rejoiced.

Carry on with your regularly scheduled day.

Friday’s whine list.  Salty with a piquant after-taste:

1.  For the fiftieth time, BROKEN LEGS SUCK!

2.  Those people who send you those inane email forwards that purport to have the simple answer to everything, without a thread of truth in them, particularly when the senders are relatives that are easily offended when you try to point this out.  

3.  Trying to get real work done while the biggest rock-and-a-hard-place financial crisis is making you feel like you are fiddling while the metaphoric Rome burns around you.

4.  Clients who, when you give them exactly what they asked for, suddenly realize that’s not what they wanted. (Even though you TRIED to tell them what they wanted.)

5.  Beautiful sunny fall days, and too much work to play hooky.

6.  Too much yarn.  Too little time.

7.  Houses that do not clean themselves.  Don’t you hate that?  I mean, what’s up with that?

 

Time to go to the Fair, y’all.

I made Jayne hat #4 for my friend, Jon.  At this point in my knitting development I have learned to heavily modify patterns to make them come out more the way I want to, and this was my best Jayne hat yet.

Good thing – it’s getting some wear.   My 4th little Jayne hat made it all the way to a restored 19th-century chapel in Ynyshir, Wales:

 

This makes me stupidly, geekily, happy.

You think this economic bailout is just for the rich?

My son’s college savings account lost 25% of its value last week.

That amounts to OVER 5 months of savings, gone.

That’s hurting the little guy.

Yes, the market will come back, but we will have to gain over 30% of the current value just to get back where we started.

It makes me just want to cry.

Why, yes, I have been.  Thanks for noticing.

It’s been busy.

I have been having a birthday. (Somewhere between 40 and 50, and that’s all I’m sayin’.)

We have been having an anniversary.  Our lucky seven.  Which we kind of, sort of, don’t really celebrate, because we were together in a committed way for three years before that.  The wedding was a formality to make his sweet Southern Baptist mother very happy.  But it gave us an excuse to get these for each other:

Oh shut up.  I know, with all my bitching about the economy, I go and buy a phone to replace my perfectly good Blackjack.  But consider this – it’s no more expensive than my current phone plan and my husband’s phone was dead anyway.  And it did spur me to start paring down the budget in many other ways.

Don’t think of it as gratuitous spending.

Don’t think of it as conspicuous consumption.

Think of it as stimulating the economy.

You’ll thank me later.