As October goes....

This month has flown by... totally disappeared while I wasn't looking.  I've spent most of the month picking pecans from our trees, then shelling them..... piles of nuts here, piles of shells there. I wear very thin latex gloves for both the picking and the shelling. The fresh nuts are covered with a sheer layer of brown dust that will discolor your hands for a few days. Not exactly a must-have for the latest nail polish color.

When you buy pecans in the store, those shells have been cleaned and waxed and they're perfectly clean and shining... not so when you pick the nuts right from the trees. Sometimes the green pods are open, sometimes the pods have turned brown and brittle... but inside each of those pods is a perfectly shelled pecan.  Every pecan I pick from those trees reminds me of the fresh eggs that I used to get from my hens... little miracles, just in nut form instead of an egg.

Today while I was picking the last of the pecans that I could reach, Pumpkin Kitty was sitting in the sun by the barn, just watching me. When I got to the trees closest to the barn, I started talking to him, telling him it was okay for me to be in 'his' yard. (When you have a male cat, they tend to take over whatever part of the yard or the house they're in at the moment.)  Pumpkin Kitty sat there watching me, and when he got tired of sitting, he stretched out in the grass and looked at me upside-down. Gatsby was on the other side of the yard, close to the pecans trees, just watching Pumpkin.... both of them are male. Both of them want to dominate the yard.  Same goes for all males of any species, I would imagine.

Tomorrow is our Halloween party.... I've been getting everything ready so I will have precious little to do for the party tomorrow night, except read, put food into the oven, and get dressed in costume. Between watching the work on the gazebo and tending to the pecans, my reading time has been cut short for the past couple of weeks.

The gazebo... it looks even prettier than it did with the old shingled roof. The copper-colored metal roof was just what this gazebo needed..... it looks like a horse-less carousel has been planted in our yard.  We'll be looking for some sort of lighting to put in the gazebo... something that works on a timer so the structure can be lit up for a while every evening. Something else for the to-do list or the look-for list.  No matter how much you do, there's always something else to add to those lists. Sure does keep life interesting.