Abstract Thursday : : Autumn

There are ten million more where these came from. 

There is no point in raking leaves  when high winds are gusting and blowing more down constantly. I'm not sure our neighbor with the leaf phobia will feel the same way, but there is a Red Flag warning (high fire danger) in effect which should prevent her gardener from, er, firing up his noisy leaf blower.

As I sat in the new living room chair with my leg up on the dog bone pillow listening to more rehashing of the election on the radio, an announcement was made that an Air Quality Alert was being added to the Red Flag Warning because of the quantity of smoke blowing down from a fire burning in Butte County a hundred miles to the north of us. A glance out the kitchen window confirmed that the hills I published yesterday had disappeared behind a veil of brownish smoke. I've put  a picture in extras of more or less the same scene taken today.

I spent a futile hour trying to catch a photo impression of the leaves falling like rain, but found it far more difficult than photographing falling water, so I settled for a collection of leaves which had collected on just one of our 35 steps. They're not as showy as the liquid amber across the street, the flamboyant Chinese PIstache all over town or the Ginko around the corner, but I think they're pretty in a subtle sort of way which matches our garden. The colors strike me as abstract in a way that only nature can create, so I left the picture as it was...straight out of the camera.

Moises, our window washer came this afternoon. The air was so bad that I told him we could reschedule if he didn't want to work outside. He stayed, but he's wearing a mask he found in his truck. He said it's been there since last October.The windows are sparkling but it's hard to tell because the air certainly isn't.

The good news is that OilMan's neck is getting better,  and so is my leg. Soon we can stop acting like invalids and get back to a more 'normal' routine. Neither one of us is very good at sitting around. But I have said for years that there is really no such thing as 'normal' unless change is part of the definition of normal....strange times we're living in. Whether it's the climate or politics, change IS the norm.