This entry is due to the combined efforts of Lynne, Selko and “S” (who honestly, may all be the same person hitting me from every angle) who all have inquired as to our well being since it’s been a blessed month since I last updated. Everything’s pretty great, I’m just stacked, and given that I have to give priority to freelance work over my first and best loved creative child (wait, did I just call this online journal my child? I am officially batshit crazy), this page gets neglected. The last two months have easily been my most traveled eight weeks of my entire life, and that includes the summer I was in England tramping all over that damned country every weekend. I’ve been to Utah, LA/Mexico and then LA again and in between those, Chicago more times than I can count (I think it’s six but it might be seven), plus weekly trips to Milwaukee for grad school, which just started up (and boy, is my professor dreamy. And yes, I know that I always say that, but this time, there’s no argument because he’s SO ever-loving dreamy that everyone must crush on him every damn class.) My Murano just topped 10K miles. Yes, it only had 6 miles on it on May 1. My life, she is awesome.
The LA trips were all for events related to Mopie and Ian’s wedding, which you can read about here and here and also, there are a million pictures on my Flickr page and also, those of the world, because we live in a digital age and it is delicious.
I came back from LA and found out that fall had started here. Que la chinga? What a shock to the system. I am not complaining, however. The final six months of the year are the perfect capsule of the best of Wisconsin’s weather. You get the lovely encompassing heat (sometimes stifling humidity), then a lovely late summer period followed by the crisp brilliant days of autumn, then the harvest time followed in short order by tentative snowflakes and the perfect fluffy sparkle of December that is always full of wonder and delight, unlike the agony of January through March, at which point the novelty of snowflakes has lifted and you want to shoot yourself in the head.
But we won’t think about that quite yet. Because right now? Right now, it is gearing up to be the best time of the year ever. It’s that transitory period, right now, right before it is autumn proper (signaled by every tree in the area lifting up its skirt and yelling “TADA!”), where everything’s still green, but things are shrinking back just a bit. Grass is turning yellow, the greens of leaves are going just a little muddy in the chilly night air. Nature is taking a deep breath before it strikes up the big finale. Geese are making Vs and honking. I see turkies everwhere. They gobble and it makes me happy. I’m guessing we’re about a week shy of seeing the first burst of color, which should be perfect, because I get to stay home for at least two weeks and also, am looking forward to some visitors from out of town next week and would like them to make “ooh” and “ahhh” sounds. It makes me feel a little bit better about the sucking that Wisconsin does the rest of the year.
Right now as I am typing this, it’s 47 degrees. This morning when I went outside to hit the farmer’s market at 7:30, there was frost on my window, and the barista gave me shit about switching from iced to hot mocha in the middle of September. It’s all related to the mercury, though. Below 50, and I need a hot cup in my hand. This is the law. Or it damn well should be.
And probably the most indicative of this turn of season is that today after the farmer’s market (where I bought mushrooms, flowers, nectarines and five pounds of blueberries), I found myself standing at the good meat market and selecting ingredients for Esteban’s favorite hearty chili (made with coarsely chopped pork loin and round steak rather than ground squicky anything) and then had it simmering happily away in the Le Creuset French Oven all day while I worked on my schoolwork. Right now, the house smells like snapdragons, Esteban’s aftershave, cumin and roasted garlic. If I didn’t have so much to do, I would make a blueberry pie. Who is this person? Good bye, summer slacker girl, I hardly knew you.
