Mockingbird Hill Cottage

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Stay safe.

Happy Saturday.

From our walk the other day: that’s our town’s park and the mountains in the distance. We see the same mountains from our house. This particular view is near our library, where we stopped to pick up some newly arrived books.

The rail trail.

There are some days I just don’t have a whole lot to say and this is one of them!

Stream of consciousness: I woke up with a slight headache and it’s still with me. My coffee is getting cold. I can hear somebody mowing their lawn in the distance. It’s sunny, but there is frost on the car windshield. Don is sitting in an old chair of ours and every time he moves, it creaks. Loudly. I need to clean the windows – this is the time when the sun streaming through the windows shows me how dirty they are. But when I clean them, they quickly get dirty again. Tonight it’s going down to 28 degrees and that will be the case for the next 3 days – then it gets warmer for another week. So – you guessed it – I’ll be moving all the porch plants into the shed for the weekend. I have to read a huge chunk of my book today and tomorrow. It’s due on Sunday. The librarians and I were laughing about that. Turns out it’s very common for 2 or 3 books in a queue to arrive at once. We’ve been watching the series Homeland, which originally aired about 10 years ago. It is excellent. We are glued to the television every night.

And that’s my little monologue for this morning. It’s been a lovely fall, but the increasingly bare trees are a depressing sight. I’ll get used to it.

12 days until midterms. VOTE.

Stay safe.

Happy Friday.

 

A common sight here: milkweed pods. I love their sculptural look. They eventually burst open and the seeds are spread on the wind. This is also the time of year that I start yanking the milkweed plants that are done for the year. I’ve had to mow around a few all season long and now I can move them to the compost pile.

I ended up mowing the entire front lawn on Monday and it took me all day yesterday to recover. It’s a beast. Don was grocery shopping and running errands for us and I didn’t want him using his injured foot too much. It’s much better now, but he had to be careful using it for a couple of weeks.

Of course, two more new books have arrived at the library. It is becoming clear to me that I won’t be able to read them all in the allotted checkout time. Some will have to be returned and requested at a later date. Fall is always the time for new releases and I’ve ordered more than I can handle. And, for the first time ever, I am holding off on the newest Louise Penny – only because I always order it right away and it ends up sitting here for 4 months before I get to it. Don’t worry – I’ll eventually buy it.

The big and horrid news is our heating oil bill. We ordered 100 gallons – we have a 250 gallon tank. Normally, that amount of oil is around $400 – $450 dollars. The cost of this 100 gallons? $647.84. Two hundred dollars more. I knew it would be higher, but this is ridiculous. All of this because of an illegal war started by Agent Orange. We only buy 100 gallons at a time because we have a very limited budget and can’t afford to fill up the tank. So we usually have about 4 deliveries a season. That adds up to $800 more. My online friend in Seattle said they just filled up their tank and the cost was $1800! She couldn’t believe it. She is retired, also. How the hell are people, especially those who are struggling already, supposed to pay to heat their homes? Medicaid is being taken away, not enough money to pay for the increases in groceries, gas, and heating oil (which is the common method of heating homes in our area.) All because of the deliberate cruelty coming out of the White House.

Between Don and me, there was a heck of a lot of cursing going on here.

So that’s been our week so far. Today I pick up the books at the library and we might start up our walks there again. We need to be more disciplined about that.

Stay safe.

Happy Wednesday.