Must be the Season of the Witch

Happy Halloween, all of my blog readers. On this day in my little college town, I like to play, "Is the person wearing the cape dressed up for Halloween, or just a theater major?" It's lot's of fun.

I am going to try harder to be better about writing in her more often. Our big cyclocross race is this weekend, so I'm hoping to have more time after that. Until that time, have a great holiday today.

Words are Stupid, Words are Fun. Words Can Put You on the Run

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-by-first-known-date/1965

check this out. You can go on the Merriam Webster page, put in your birth year and it will tell you which words were first used in print on that day. You will not be surprised to hear that the word "spaz" was first used in print on the year that I was born.

And Everybody Tells Me That It's Cool to be a Cat

It's Friday and since I'm not up for writing a real blog post today, I will leave you with pictures of my cat. I know, it's not much of a prize, but it's probably WAY better than listening to me ramble on.

The first photo was from when Archie was still a very active kitten, John didn't live with me yet and the bottom kitchen cupboards had yet to be sanded, primed and painted. Things are so much better now than 7 years ago on all fronts.

I hope you all have a great weekend. It's Homecoming here and supposed to be very rainy. Two good reasons to stay away from downtown on Saturday. Holing up at home or heading to Des Moines for a race are looking like my best options.

Okay, so... May your weekend be long on fun and short on fat orange cats.

Sunflower Good Morning. You Sure Do Make It Look Like a Sunny Day.

So, the garden is on its last legs, but I'm still getting some things out of it. This weekend I finally decided to try and harvest some sunflower seeds.

The sunflower innards are funky looking.

I had originally planted them because they are beautiful, but also because we feed the birds in our backyard, sunflower seeds and I thought it might relieve us of the cost of a couple of bags of seed.

I probably waited too long to harvest them because, as you can see, the birds got a head start. I guess the seeds are for them anyway, so it's not like I'm mad that they ate them in the Summer as opposed to the Fall or Winter...It's just less work to get them off of their flower head thingies.

Anyway, I did my thing and it took about an hour and half to cut the flowers off of the stalks, get them all together, brush the pollen off of the seeds and then pull the seeds out. Those damn birds better appreciate all of this.

Now, the seeds are drying out and I only have a few more food projects with the garden. I still have to cut up, blanch and freeze the butternut squash and then make some pepperoncini with the banana and Anaheim peppers that are still growing like crazy.

All of this sunflower seed harvesting was lots of fun and everything but the weird, busy, patterns from the flowers and seeds are enough to give me a migraine. They do make for some cool photos, though.