Mural and Summer's Over

The lawn started to recover from its fungus and then it was cooking hot for a few weeks and it dies again. It is just about all recovered now, just in time to die for winter. I figure I have one more mowing, then I am done.

It was a long hot summer and it is still unseasonably warm and five cucumbers and even more green peppers are making a race for the finish. Boise's average first frost is between October 11 and 20, so they have two weeks. My tomato plants are still full of green tomatoes and I doubt they will all make it to red in time. My friend tells me I can dig them up before the first frost and hand them upside down in the garage. They will still ripen and stay fresh. This sounds like an old farmer trick. I am also told that if I had potatoes and onions, I could just leave them in the ground and dig them up when I wanted to eat them, no matter what the season.

I am still picking raspberries every day, but they are slowing down. The arched branches that are hanging over the lawn started to grow side branches, which then started to flower, and the plant looks nicely full,

Those flowers will probably not have a chance to be berries, but when I cut back the raspberry for winter I will get to see the blueberry bushes again. They turned color last year and looked pretty longer than anything else.

It is definitely autumn, seasons change quickly here, it is cooler at night and the days are already dramatically shorter, but we only had one really cool night so far to inspire those leaves to change. If you look, you can see bits of a start of fall color, but not the panorama of color yet.

A few weeks ago I went out to Nampa, about 20 minutes west of Boise, to do my friend a favor. I decided most of Nampa is pretty dumpy. There are nice farms and a newer part of town that is supposed to be nice, but the town itself is sad. I did take some horses pictures, although not good enough to paint. They make the neighborhood look much more picturesque than it really was.

A guy at work that owns a laundromat wants a mural. This is my comp, pasted into the location,

I put off doing the comp and went through the expected pain of not being able to use markers and draw the way that I think I should. That is what happens when you let yourself get out of practice. I also have no reason to keep up my set of markers and realized I no longer have all the colors I think I need. I don't know what happened to my perfect blue sky marker, it probably dried up. The client was surprised to get something so detailed and in color, so I guess it did the job.

With the heat and the smoke, it was not a pretty summer in Boise this year and I am glad it is over. I still really like my job, and I like my boss. To have both at this point feels like a well earned miracle


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Indian Summer and Cascade Rafters

It is Indian Summer here, my favorite time of year. The days are warm, but not hot, and the evenings are cooling off. The garden is coming to an end, although I will have an overabundance of tomatoes and raspberries for at least another month. I don't remember how many tomato plants this is, maybe 3,

I tied up the tomatoes and the raspberries the best I could now that they are huge, I will do better next year,

I do not understand what the blueberry is doing. It is huge and has tall ends that look like seed or flower pods, nothing like it did when it bloomed last spring,

Here is one day's harvest last week, including a tomato mutant,

Hey, did I harvest some honey? No, my neighbor's friend has bees and more honey than they know what to do with, so Sarah brought me some. It is raw, but not still in the comb. I remember eating honey still in the comb on toast in Michigan. It is still one of the best things I ever tasted.

Here is Cruiser banished to outside, so Spit can finish her dinner in peace,

Saturday morning I decided to take that trip to McCall and get away from the smoke. It was hazy there and way too crowded for me, so I left and stopped along the Payette River on my way home instead. Cascade Raft and Kayak was just upstream and the river was full of rafts and kayaks for the holiday weekend.

The rafting and the kayaking looked fun, but sitting on a beach in the shade with a cool breeze waving at people as they floated by was as better.

In the end, it was a beautiful, perfect weather weekend in Boise. The geese are back to honking as they fly overhead. It was cool enough today to resume my walking and the cemetery is full of geese again, waiting for me to tell them how much I missed them.

In So Cal, Indian Summer can go into November with some trips back to summer in between, but not here. We are predicting a short autumn, because of the long, hot summer, and some think there will not be much autumn color because the summer was so dry. Even I know from experience that winter comes overnight at the beginning of November. So that leaves a few more weeks of summer, but it is hard not to think about spending some of it preparing for winter.