Hello, October. How I love you.

Wet weather (which I don't mind), fall colors, holidays.

Halloween is my favorite celebration of the year. Costumes, parties, and candy. Granted, I haven't celebrated heartily in a few years. Today, I put up some purple lights and thought about printing some decorations for the windows. Sort of ticked off that they wouldn't be visible from the street. So I am going to keep my eye open for cheap dollar store decorations. I'm also looking for some of those orange jack o'lantern leaf bags. So that when my giant maple tree dumps, I have some fun decorations for the yard too.

Speaking of yard. Over the past two months, I have been prepping beds and doing some experimental planting.

The bed (fenced in by chicken wire) to the far left contains peas and beans. The ones I'm working on in the picture are now planted with spinach and a few cabbage sprouts.

For the past week or so, I have been enjoying "yard snacks" of purple and yellow bush beans. The peas are flowering and have itty bitty pea pods emerging.

Today, I planted some collard greens sprouts along a back fence area which gets excellent light all day. I also plan to plant some chard and other overwintering plants in a week or so when the sprouts look robust enough to harden and be transplanted.

Along that back fence, I also have a pumpking plant which I planted very late in the season and which has been kicking out small pumpkins which the squirrels and crows seem to steal almost as they emerge. Some animal is also scavenging the big yellow flower buds. I'm learning for it, and I plant to net the pumpkin plant I'll try to grow next year.

We've had a few small outdoor fires last month. Our next door neighbors, a family from Beijing and their tenant (also from Beijing and going to pastry school) have stopped by a few times to enjoy a little campfire action. Cecilia (the pastry student) sometimes makes me special desserts which magically show up with my hubby when he comes home from visiting next door. I officially have the coolest neighbors ever.

Rachel came by to visit last week also. She brought her spinning and visited with me while I finished spindles. She's a 911 dispatcher, and I met her through the Fantabulous Tuesday Knitting Group that I host in Green Lake, WA. She's been working full-time, so we've been making time for each other regularly to catch up and play with yarnz around her wacky schedule.

This weekend, we took Judy the greyhound to several parks while the weather was still nice. She's been acclimating to homelife really well and everyone she meets remarks on how sweet she is. She met lots of children who get to feed her treats (which we provide) so that she can get comfortable with greeting strangers. She's so used to treats from strangers that she approaches everybody in sight with a "please!?" look, expecting a handout. She also got to visit a pet store with a grooming station and had her nails trimmed down. At the pet store, she gets to meet lots of dogs in a friendly manner. She's still very shy of other dogs, but we hope to show her that dogs of all shapes and sizes can make good friends too!