I got home at 3 a.m. Saturday from the trifecta trip: D.C. sightseeing, FinCon19 and a visit to my brother’s. Very little sleep and not much to drink on the long trip, so I attributed my slight sore throat to fatigue and the dryness of airplane air.
After about five hours of sleep I spent a lovely, quiet day with DF, including a trip to Glen Alps in the city’s Hillside neighborhood, for a little fresh air and a short walk to enjoy the view.
When I left everything was still unnaturally green due to warmer-than-usual summer, but there’s definitely an autumnal feeling now: leaves turning gold, a coolness in the air, a lowering angle of sun, the sharp scent of highbush cranberries and dying vegetation.
Our back yard is dying back, too, but a ton of tomatoes still peep out from the tangle of outdoor vines. It’s pretty astonishing that they’re doing as well as they are, given that they’re varieties like Stupice and Czech’s bush rather than Siberian hybrid tomatoes.
The outdoor cucumber vines are yellowing but still producing; also unusual, but welcome, since the greenhouse vines are spawned-out. The pea vines are definitely on the wane, yet I picked enough to yield a full pint of shelled fruit, which will make the coming year’s turkey pies that much more succulent. The pods went into the boiling bag, to yield yet another container of soup stock with a definite sweetness.
And oh, the pumpkins, whose vines started slowly but have now produced five or six behemoths that will remain in situ until just before the first frost. Most will be divided among family and friends, with the proviso that we get the pulp scooped out during the jack o’lantern process. We’ll save a few seeds to plant and roast the rest, and add the squishy parts to the boiling bag.
By early evening I realized that I still had the sore throat, along with some congestion and headache. No elevation in temperature, though, so I figured it was a virus that I could kill with fluids and rest.
Sleeping for about 10 hours didn’t drive it away, so this morning DF bundled me back into bed with a couple of heated rice socks and an Advil PM. For almost the next six hours I slept deeply, and woke still under the weather but definitely stronger, albeit somewhat Rip Van Winkled by the loss of most of a day.
And then DF built the first fire of the season.
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