A day at the Arboretum

A few days ago, before the temperatures dropped and the winds picked up, Pete and I went off to the Arboretum in Guelph! It was very colourful there:

I mean, this is the view from the side of the *parking lot*.

The Arboretum is part of the University of Guelph and all I can say is, lucky students, getting to stroll over here between classes or to de-stress.

We had a perfect day for it, too - hardly a cloud! And beams of sunlight filtering through to the wooded paths. You can barely make out the bench in the lower right corner of this shot, but you can definitely imagine enjoying the view from it.

What a great place to sit down with some knitting. 

IF YOU HAD REMEMBERED TO BRING KNITTING.

That's right folks. I forgot to bring my high-pressure, deadline-looming sock on this car trip! 

Admittedly that turned out to be a good thing, because we took some elaborate custom driving routes and I had to keep referring to a map, but still. I can't believe I wasted that golden opportunity.

Let's look at more pictures to gloss over that omission, shall we? We might, for example, reflect on how gorgeous trees are even as they drop their leaves to the ground in a lush, textural carpet.

Or admire the way they mark a choice between two possible paths.

Since our outing, as I say, the temperatures have gotta a lot cooler - definitely sweater-friendly. And though the sun is bright outside as I type this, and the sky a brilliant blue with only a few, fluffy and white clouds, it's clear we're heading to winter.

I can't wait, honestly. I mean I love this autumn season most of all, but I find I'm craving those cold winter days when it feels good to stay inside and do crafty things, or read a luxurious immersive story, or do both thanks to the miracle of audiobooks.

But first, I gotta finish those socks, aiiieeeeee this deadline is scarier than Halloween, I am tellin ya.

Ahem.

Hope you have, or have had by the time you read this, a lovely Saturday. Thanks for visiting the trees with me! and I'll see you next weekend, hopefully in a better state of sock readiness.

I need an intervention

These SOCKS. When did I even start them? I used to be able to knit a pair of fingering-weight socks in a week, and this is many many months. With a deadline to finish / run in ends / wet block / dry / wrap in about five weeks.

What am I doing??? Other than going out and buying more vintage plates when I certainly don't need them. My love for vintage plates and interesting book cover art is catching up to the love of yarn stash acquisition which I'm still holding firmly in check. This is all wrong! And look, the second sock is still at the chompy stage. 

 

Watch out, orange fruit, that sock is comin' to get ya.

To think I am for once knitting in seasonal colours, and still can't get my act together. Le sigh.

Well at least the writing is going well. And the weather has been magnificent here in Toronto. Earlier this week Pete and I wrangled an extra long lunch so we could walk in the sunshine through part of the fabulous ravine park system we have in this city. And despite reports that this year's temperatures have dampened the colour brilliance among the turning leaves, we still got to see this:

From a forest trail above the creek

From a bridge over the creek

Aren't these gorgeous? I mean, even if you have a ton of knitting to do, seasons like this are once a year. You *have* to get out and enjoy them, amiright?

In fact I'm about to head off for another stroll shortly. Hope your weekend's full of good things, even if there are some less than stellar ones thrown in. See you next Saturday but in the meantime send good thoughts for these poor socks to learn to knit themselves - that may be their only chance!

I finally saw the Northern Lights

My bucket list is officially empty: seeing the Northern Lights was the only thing I ever had on it.

Mind you, since I saw them in Toronto over a haze of city lighting, they weren't as spectacular as you could get somewhere quieter. I couldn't hear the crackling that goes with, I couldn't see this much without the camera on my phone, and the photograph shows more than what I caught with my eyes. Still, super exciting. I was so lucky I had enough charge on my phone to grab this much of a chance!

I will totally try again, because I really want to hear that crackly sound in person. They're projected to be pretty visible pretty often for the next few years so fingers crossed it works out.

By day, I've been focusing on being outside in gorgeous autumn weather. I saw this on a ravine walk...

And this in the cemetery...

And as always, I can't help thinking these colour combos would be fantastic in a sweater. I'm not sure I've ever seen that shade of blue sky reproduced in yarn though, have you? You get such a glow from the sun.

I also restained some worn spots on our deck, so fingers crossed the wood'll hold up another year! No pictures of that, because nobody wants to watch paint dry, especially when it's white.

Oh! as a substitute for drying paint, you might enjoy these seventy-year-old Agatha Christie covers I posted and captioned on my Instagram feed yesterday:

It must've been a blast to be a commercial artist when everything was advertising, don't you think?

As to knitting, I'm getting A Little Concerned. The socks I'm delivering in a month are over the heel flap but not much farther, and at my current snail pace I am not gonna make it. I am going to have to build in more knitting time, which is awkward, because I've also had to pick up my writing time. Oh well - I'll figure it out!

Hope you have a great weekend figured out - thanks for dropping by and I look forward to seeing you next Saturday. Till then, another trio of Northern Lights pictures, looking north from a sandy spot on Toronto's port lands at the shore of Lake Ontario.

Sweet sweet lemonade

Hello again! I hope you've had a lovely couple of weeks? I caught up on quite a bit, if not everything, and finally had time to create a new cooking setup:

I know, the innovation! A spice rack. But it's an exciting change all the same. And not only because I love this shelf a ton and haven't had it in circulation for years, being wrongly convinced that it wouldn't fit under our cabinets.

*

Today's story begins unhappily, about two months ago when I noticed bugs lying dead on the counter I reserve for baking, or else staggering around on it. This was perplexing because there were a lot of them. When more appeared the next day, I realized they'd fallen from the cupboard above. 

Turns out I'd had the dumb luck of buying a bag of wheat berries infested with said bugs via a tiny hole I'd unknowingly positioned within about an inch of a can of cherry pie filling I hadn't gotten around to using, which in turn had a leak positioned in the direction of the tiny hole. 

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that if a can of anything leaks, it's very possibly because of a pressure buildup from botulism. In this case I would slide that scale to 'almost certainly'. Despite having a multi-year lifespan, these bugs were dying young after gorging themselves on the runoff.

So much for the yucky backstory: the result was, I had to decontaminate *every*thing in the cupboard and on the counter, leaving me heartbroken and procrastinating (for the aforementioned two months, during which I basically had caution tape around the whole area) until I realized that addressing the problem would give me a blank canvas for rebuilding the way I store things in the kitchen. 

Lemonade from lemons, is there anything better?

Plus, just in time for fall! Not to mention Canadian Thanksgiving, a foodfest that's happening next weekend already.

Over the summer, when I was mostly making salads, I'd started keeping a few staples like shallots and tiny tomatoes in a glass loaf pan on the cooking side of the counter, but I was still walking to the baking side to get any herbs and spices I wanted to throw in there, because I had no other place to stow them. 

Not any more! Having been forced to rebuild my supplies, I found my old red shelf could accommodate everything while going vertical. That's freed up the now-empty cupboards over the baking counter to accommodate some of the baking stuff I was crowding into the drawer below it. 

And if all this news isn't exciting enough for you: brace yourself.

Our coffee making is dying, and our kettle has decided it will only work if I hold my thumb on the power switch till it's finished boiling. 

So I'm gonna be totally overhauling the coffee and tea station as well.

Today.

But probably after a nap because all this change is a lot to take in.

In other news, I still have not finished the socks I started in spring and have to gift *next month.* but I did finish polishing the manuscript I started around the same time, so I might actually get them wrapped more than ten minutes before delivery. More on that next week, I hope.

Hope you have a lovely Saturday and thank you as always for dropping by, especially after a two-week break in the ol' routine!