Well, I am back. I didn't realize that I haven't posted anything since August 24 and it is now October 1. Damn!! Anyway, welcome to October and the last quarter of 2018.

I am ignoring as much as possible the politics. It is far too annoying and after you have called bullshit on bullshit (and the bullshitters) too many times you begin to feel like a broken record. And it doesn't do any good because the old bullshitters will keep on doing their bullshit--and splattering it all over the rest of us.

Instead I have been concentrating on the gardens, needlework, and reading.

It has been a good year for those pursuits. I finished two crochet blankets for our beds, two embroidered table scarves and one table cloth, some crochet pieces to protect the headrests and arms of our recliners, and several doilies. I have a short stack of the embroidered pieces that need to be hemmed. Since that is a tedious and much disliked task I plan to do that when I need a bit of tedium. I just finished consolidating all my embroidery floss which involved taking skeins off stitch-bows and winding them onto floss bobbins. That turned out to be a bigger chore than I planned. I thought I had four stitch-bow albums and found seven. Each one would hold fifty skeins on their stitch-bows which are flexible plastic pieces just the right length for the skein as it comes from the manufacturer with notches in each end to make sure the thread stayed in place. Why change? Well, I also have eight boxes floss boxes with floss in them--basically 8x12 (approximately, I haven't measured) divided into 2 inch squares. Those hold a lot more floss. But whenever I started a new project I had to hunt through all of those for the right colors. Big pain in the butt and I always wound up buying more when I really didn't need to. Also the stitch-bows had all the inconvenience of the skeins without any real benefit. If you pulled the wrong end you still got tangles and the stitch-bow itself got tangled into the mess. Better to choose one system of storage and stick with it.

I took out the tomato and pepper plants about a month ago. The peppers did give us a nice bunch of peppers to freeze and we used a couple in salads. The tomatoes were a disappointment and what we got we stewed and froze. That made a very nice chunky cream of tomato soup not long ago. I have said before that my little patio is a difficult environment because between the spring and fall equinoxes it becomes an oven as the sun heats up the cement and the white fence reflects light and heat onto the patio. It can be 20F higher on the patio than the official temperature--say 110 vs 90. The other six months it gets progressively colder as the cement loses heat and the area becomes an ice box. The temperature disparity isn't as extreme but it is still there--in the opposite direction. Other plants have done very well. I got almost two pint jars of spearmint, lavender, and peppermint and about a pint of basil, cinnamon basil, pineapple sage and sage. Smaller amounts of chives, oregano, chocolate mint, lemon verbena, and lemon balm. We have had several servings of yogurt with our own strawberries and almost half a pint of dried strawberries for tea.

I will leave this for now and talk about plans for next year next time. Unless I get hold of something more interesting.