Dispatches from Last Fall

This piece of local color brought to you back from the dim and musty archives of at least four months ago.  The laptop that had the pictures on it was on the fritz and then out for service and, well, here they are.

Anyway, we have two mature maples that cover at least half of our lot. They are fantastic during the summer because they shade the house pretty much entirely during summer afternoons, cutting the cooling bill nicely. They also had great color last fall.

The downside is that clearing out those leaves after they fell took us ten man-hours to get the roughly 85% we actually cleared out, me with the rake and Ana with the leaf blower.  The rest wasn't worth going after, being under the ivy, etc.

This pile was better than waist-high on me (Lee) in the middle and probably thirty feet long.  On the plus side, we didn't have to bag it or anything - the street department just comes along on your regular trash day and the pile vanishes, no need to call or extra charges or anything.  We felt both the pictures of the leaves on the trees and off them were worth showing. The trees are great about 364 days of the year, when I am not moving their several million fallen leaves.

Cat Sweater

As part of Ana's ongoing program of transitioning into being a crazy cat lady*, we present the following pictures.

 One suspiciously cat-sized sweater.

  

One unsuspecting cat.

 

 Can't you tell she just loves it?

 Apparently she finds it so soothing that she feels the need to lie down on the ground and not get up until the sweater is removed.**

*The sweater was actually a test knit and was a mini-scale version of one intended for people - neither the pattern nor the product was originally intended for cats.  Didn't stop us.

**No cats were harmed in the preceding process. Physically, at least. No guarantees on possible psychological ramifications.