brown county bounty

Forget peak leaf week...I think we hit peak leaf DAY when we went to Brown County State Park this past week!

Colors were amazing.

Others were haunting the trails, too.

red-tailed hawk

"woolly bear" caterpillar

painted turtles

And why not?  It was almost 80 degrees!  At home, I continue to see insects everywhere...and it was so warm the other night that I heard tree frogs singing...kind of unusual for late October.  

spotted cucumber beetle

milkweed bug nymph

oleander aphids

But I don't think I'll be seeing them for long.  In the span of a few days, we're going from 80 to 23 degrees, and the hard frost will kill everything in the garden and send these bugs into hibernation.  It's amazing that we've had flowers for this long!  I gathered up a big armful today for the last bouquets of the season.

The kittens have been loving the sunshine...

...but they will like curling up by a warm fire, too.  We'll see what happens over the next few days.  Have a great week!  

pollen fallin'

A red-tailed hawk has been spending a lot of time in our backyard lately.

I'm usually alerted to his presence by the cawing of crows.  A group of crows can 'mob' a hawk in a pre-emptive strike, and it's interesting to watch them gather on branches around the hawk and engage in intimidating swooping.  I wonder if this is the same hawk that spent so much time around here last year.  Check out that red tail!  

 

Hawks are doing slow circles in the sky every day.  They  make beautiful silhouettes.

The birds are definitely out lately.  When I go outside in the morning to feed the strays, it's usually still dark.  But there's a cacophony of sound from the birds.  I do my best to identify calls.  I love hearing one of my favorites, the house finch.  They're such cheerful little birds, and now they're everywhere, preparing nests! 

It's a bittersweet time of year, because the camellias are finished.  Oh, I can still get a few from the bushes, but they're limp within a day or so.  The azaleas are popping out, at least!

Even my favorite azalea is opening up.

The usual bouquets...they make me happy.

A brief period of pollen...

...and more signs of spring.  New fern fronds unfurling in our backyard...

...and woodland flowers in the woods.

Sweet Clotilde sleeps on our back stairs, watching it all happen!

Meanwhile, I have done little knitting and no sewing.  Just so busy.  But I did take some time out to bake a cake when we had company recently.  I used to bake layer cakes, but we'd always have so much leftover cake.  Now my go-to is the simple chocolate loaf cake from Smitten Kitchen.  It doesn't need any embellishment, but sometimes I whip up a little sour cream chocolate frosting.

Absolutely perfect...and nearly no leftovers!  :)

Have a great week! 

My-my-my-my Corona

Since I feel pretty secure with knitting and purling in the Portuguese style, I thought I'd try a stranded yarn project.  Something small - a pair of fingerless mittens.  I watched videos and bent two large paper clips to tension the yarn through, one on either side of my collar.  I'm afraid it was too much of a fiddly mess for me, and I ended up knitting the second mitten the traditional way.

But ouch, my fingers!  Thankfully, I discovered a product called a "Norwegian knitting thimble," which is a miniature metal coil that slides over your index finger.  It has two jutting coils that your yarn strands feed through, and thus your yarn is tensioned without smashing your fingers together too tightly.  Apparently this works for stranded knitting as well - one color of yarn in each coil.  I'll be excited to try this when my thimble arrives!

In other fiber news, Todd and I went to a quilt show this weekend.  I was interested in the color, detail, and design of the quilts...

...but mainly I was interested in the actual quilting.  I noticed that most people used a design called stippling, which is basically random squiggles across the fabric.  It's not a style that appeals to me, so I was glad to see many other designs implemented.

I even got to see a long-arm quilting machine in action.

One of these babies will set you back between $3500 and $5000!  You can program in an overall design and the machine will go to work, or you can grip the handles and quilt your own.  The idea of having so much space and freedom is really appealing, but the price tag is not.  For now, I'll stick to my cramped home machine.

We saw the full eclipse!  Here's the corona.

I didn't use a solar filter, just the iPhone.  I loved seeing the 360 degree sunset, then total darkness for almost 3 minutes!  A man near us in the parking lot where we waited had flown in from Denmark just for those 3 minutes.  He got in his car and headed back to Atlanta for his outgoing flight right after the sun came back out.  It just emphasized how special this experience really was!

Here at the house, we're still seeing swarms of hummingbirds.

Our red-tailed hawk continues to perch around the property, and thankfully he's grown out of his adolescent squawks!

Our average heat index has been between 95 and 100 degrees, and it's pretty unpleasant.  Even in Indiana, August is my least favorite month, and the last 2 weeks of August are always the worst.  My yearly ritual has begun.  "Look, the season must be advancing.  The sweet autumn clematis is in bloom."

"Nandina berries are taking on their blush."

"Beauty berries are in full color."

It's still tough, though.  At least we can enjoy the color...

...and take heart in the rapidly-shifting calendar pages, even if we can't feel an actual change.

And hey, we're always enjoy the antics of our indoor cats, even though most of those antics are relatively sedate.

Here's hoping for cooler days ahead.  Have a great week!