Autumn is Here, and a weekend of weekend-ness

Autumn is here, in fact as well as in name.

I can tell not only because my apples are coming ripe and the grapes in my hedgerow are sweet and full, not only because every store is selling pumpkins and my dash is full of Hallowe’en, but because between Thursday and Friday the temperatures dropped precipitously.

Both highs and lows are 10-20 degrees F lower than they were at the beginning of last week – from low 80s and low 50s (28°C/12°C or so) to low 70s-> mid 60’s down to mid-40s at night(18°C-4°C or so). It came on literally overnight, and here I am, hoping the chimney sweep and the furnace check-up guy get here soon. Brrr!

In the meantime, we’ve been chopping brush to burn, hauling firewood into the house, moving firewood around the garage… cleaning the garage so we have room for the firewood (that’s mostly T)…and pulling the gutters down on the short front of the house.

(Our house has two sections: a one-story section that houses the kitchen & utility room (and dreaded foyer) and a two-story section with the rest of the house.)

The gutter was… interesting. When we pulled down the rotted board BEHIND the gutter, we found about a jillion dead wasps nests, some dead wasps… and a skeleton mouse. Yay nature~

Autumn is here, ‘though the leaves haven’t started to change yet. Home repairs are going into overdrive in anticipation of the cold that’s coming, and the cats are growing an extra coat of fur for the winter. “Winter is coming,” Oli insists, as he devours an extra helping of food.

“Winter is coming,” I agree, and stack some more firewood.

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0 thoughts on “Autumn is Here, and a weekend of weekend-ness

  1. Autumn really did attack overnight this year. I’m appreciating it, as hot, sticky weather with no rain was getting *really* old, but with no adjustment period weather I’d normally find delightful is kind of chilly. No firewood to chop (maybe someday I will live somewhere with a functional fireplace again), but sealing the windows will start surprisingly soon.

    • Sort of glad it wasn’t just here that autumn was like Hai Here I Am! Oh, crap, window sealing. We have to do the thing soon, too.

      • I’m only a state and a half away from you, and they’re small east-coast states. 😉 Yeah, window-sealing is a huge pain. I wind up doing it in bits and pieces because there keep being days when I want the windows open even as there are nights when I want to stop up all the drafts. And then it takes me just as long to get them all unsealed in the spring.

        • About 1/3 of our windows we just don’t open – the big, too-cheap picture windows in the front of the house, the tiny window up in the upstairs – and then a couple we just “seal” on the window sash and thus can still open them without sealing them. But that leaves fixing what the cats ruined and then the big windows.

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