Autumn has arrived

Whilst we have escaped the worst of the weather here in our part of Wales, I feel sorry for a friend up in Orkney who has it in spadefulls, and living at the water's edge makes it even wilder for her and her husband.

Although we have had enough rain to raise the water levels in the river by 2 or 3 feet, the ground has largely soaked it up after such a dry September.

I have managed to get some tidying up done in the garden, around the wildlife pond mainly, and we have picked the few sound cooking apples off the tree in the garden, and also the Christmas eaters that we could reach easily (the tree is swathed by Paul's Himalayan Musk, that beautiful but rampant rambler we planted some 20 years ago).  I am still picking and eating runner beans, but they are starting to quickly swell into seedpods now, so I will put those to dry out in the polytunnel.

I got cracking earlier in the day and made a quick Spelt loaf in the breadmaker, so that I could get on with trying to get to the bottom of the ironing mountain, whilst I caught up on some programmes that I'd recorded from recent weeks of tv!  The Who Do You Think You Are programme about Vic Reeves was very interesting.  I finally got to watch the programme about Irish Babies I'd recorded a couple of weeks ago, children who had been taken from "fallen girls" and peddled by the Catholic Church/nuns to rich families in America, though one or two of those were far from ideal . . .   We don't watch much tv in the evenings as we are in bed fairly early - before 9.30 most nights.  I did indeed finish the ironing and just have the winter-weight kitchen curtains to iron and hang tomorrow, as we will soon need them once the temperatures drop.

We viewed an auction this afternoon and have jotted down some things we would "like" to buy, but generally the world and his wife has also jotted down these same items and they go beyond our means.

I had a nice arrival in the mail box (which is a tatty old enamel bread bin under the porch) and it was a new-to-me Phil Rickman novel, The Secrets of Pain.  It is about to become my new bedtime reading book, and the biography about Laura Ingalls Wilder is about to be sidelined for a while!

I went up into the attic this morning, to find that we were plagued with cluster flies again, so although some have had their liberty, there are plenty of dead ones which I need to vacuum up.  Blasted things.  I shan't miss those if we don't have them where we finally move to.

So, a catching up day.  Much needed too.  The cheese pasties I have been trying to make since the end of last week, finally ended up on our plates at teatime.  Cheesy pastry too - my OH's was just plain mince with small chunks of potato.  Mine contained mince/onion/garlic/bacon which was meant to be a Spag, Bol,. for when our middle daughter G arrived for tea last night, but then she reminded me she still didn't like tomatoes . . .  It made a lovely mixture for a pasty.

Right, I shall try and remember there is a special moon tomorrow night - a total lunar eclipse.  Bet it's too cloudy to see it here in Wales!