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October indoor chill
Sunday, October 10 2010
Marissa had come up from the city partly to enjoy the country, but mostly she was here to join Gretchen and others in helping our friend Jenny at her farm animal sanctuary over in Willow. It was that time of year again, harvest season, a time when turkeys are plumped up and slaughtered, occasionally in front of chirpingly-inane politicians. To combat those non-compassionate assumptions about the purpose of the season, Jenny hosts a one-day festival called Thanksliving. People come from all over the place to sit down to a delicious vegan meal while live turkeys stroll about among them. For Gretchen and Marissa it would be a long work day, so they left early this morning, leaving me with the house all to myself.
It was another beautiful sunny October day. October is far from my favorite season; I don't like the low angle of the sun, the chill of the nights, or the looming burden of firewood gathering. But it is a great season for hot baths. There's usually plenty of sun and the solar panels are arranged so that they make efficient use of the low angle of the sunlight. And the weather (and especially the indoor house climate) is cool enough to make bathing feel like a luxury. Indoor household temperatures tend to be lowest in October and November, during the period when outdoor temperatures are falling but I still haven't turned on the boiler or gotten into the habit of building a fire in the woodstove.
One thing that the changing of the season has rendered unnecessary is the plumbing-attached garden hose. That was only ever used for watering the garden, but now there is plenty of ground water while almost all vegetative growth has concluded. Any future outdoor water needs can be met by the various rain barrels or the greenhouse well. So I drained and coiled up the garden hose. Hopefully I won't need it again until June.
Lately I've been enjoying the animated series entitled Ugly Americans on Comedy Central. I enjoy the constant visual richness of this reimagined New York City, a place where any sort of mutated lifeform is possible, from two-headed worm people and disembodied hovering central nervous systems to six-legged Triceratopses. The spectacle (and many of the gags) tends to be of the gross-out variety, so it's not really something I can watch while eating a heaping plate of black bean curry (what I had for dinner tonight).
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