*checks the weather forecast for the next week or so*
Done well before the first snow!
And, delightfully, done mulching for the season.
For those of you following along at home, we went through about 35 cubic yards of mulch this year, dispersing it to a mix of previously and newly mulched areas, such as around the raised beds in the vegetable garden (old) and creating a back perimeter path (new). Our most recent new spot, which finished out the mulch pile, is in the front yard, set up for a variety of fruit that will be growing in the area.
Normally, I’d say we’re done gardening for the season. It is, after all, November. But the growing season has been entirely weird, I picked some raspberries earlier this week and we have some white strawberries still, though I don’t expect those will have time to ripen. It’s warm enough that weeding can still happen, which is really just a head start for spring weeding.
Or happy Halloween, depending which you celebrate. Both is, of course, an option. As we wrap up the harvest season, at least those of us in northern climates that are rapidly moving towards winter, we celebrate the shifting seasons with Samhain, taking the opportunity to mourn our losses at this point in the year when the veil between the living and spirit world is considered to be at its thinnest.
In the United States, we also celebrate Halloween, a holiday that has derived from Samhain and similar celebrations. While Halloween parties usually fall on the weekend that precedes the holiday, whatever day of the week Halloween falls traditionally sees children donning costumes and going door-to-door trick-or-treating, requesting goodies (typically candy) from their neighbors. Many towns now have designated trick-or-treating hours, usually ranging a couple hours before and after sunset; our hours are 4-8pm, with a 5:50pm sunset.
We live in an area of town where trick-or-treating is light: the yards are reasonably wide, and there are no sidewalks or street lights, all of which discourage families from wandering our block. We usually see a handful of people before dark and that’s it. That is not, in my mind, worth buying a large bag of candy for, since we would then need to eat the remainders. Instead, I have a box of toys I set on a table by the front door with a “please take one” sign. These toys keep easily between years – unlike chocolate – and can be added to when the box starts to run low.
Though it’s not running low yet, I wanted to experiment with crocheting a ghost this year. And once I had made a couple of those, I wanted a spider – a pattern I’ve crocheted before – and threw together a couple Frankenstein monsters as well. Other than the spider, these aren’t stuffed… in terms of shape, they’re essentially upside down pots, holding themselves up on the weight of the yarn. Hopefully they’ll be enjoyed by the small number of people who wander by our house.
As I mentioned last week, it was time for Dorkstock again. This is always a fun weekend for me, not the least of which is because I get to play and run games like Cartoon Frag and Life-Sized Kill Doctor Lucky. This year’s Dorkstock was momentous in several way: the debut of the Gamehole Plush Monster Island (minor tweaks are needed to a couple characters who were overly powerful), along with Steve Jackson & John Kovalic’s announcement about Munchkin 2nd Edition, as well as plans for a Munchkin RPG with 9th Level Games made for an exciting weekend.
When it comes down to it though, what makes conventions shine in my life are the people. Some of our Dorkstock crew gathered on Wednesday night, taking the rare opportunity to play games among ourselves after our initial room set-up. Thursday morning, before an early start at Life-Sized Doctor Lucky, I was delighted to find out that my best friend from high school – whose podcast, Memoirs of a Neurodivergent Latina, I’ve mentioned before – was attending for the first time, GMing for Monte Cook Games just down the hall from Dorkstock. Despite our busy schedules, we managed to grab some time together across a couple meals and random encounters. Maybe next time we can play a game together.
Every year, John Kovalic designs a new plush for Gamehole Con, the parent convention that hosts Dorkstock. A couple years ago, it occurred to me that I could combine those plush into a Monster Island game, a game I’ve owned for a couple decades now. The hard part, beyond retroactively acquiring a second set of most of the plush (the owlbear, alas, is no longer available), was coming up with their stats and special abilities while keeping the variety of creatures somewhat balanced in game play.
Among other things, I needed to take into account that some abilities just wouldn’t be useful against other monsters. The cute orange beast pictured here, for example, is a Rust Monster. But the other monsters don’t wear armor! They do, however, have the ability to pick up and throw several crocheted food trucks and garbage cans, all of which are theoretically made of metal. While it would have been amusing to let the Rust Monster just destroy those items, it seemed better to let is recover health by consuming them, though playtesting went through a couple iterations of what that restored health value would be.
But I didn’t make the food trucks just for the Rust Monster. Food trucks are part of the Gamehole Con tradition, adding food options beyond the convention center selection. And if there are food trucks, well, there have to be people (OK, meeple) gathered near them. This was one of the places where I tweaked the Monster Island game mechanics… each monster has two special abilities, and they’re activated by consuming meeple. That includes the Rust Monster’s ability to heal by consuming metal… they lost in the last playtest round because while they were in reach of a metal item, they were out of meeple. Oops. (The pictured kobold is a stand-in from 9th Level Games’ Kobolds Ate My Baby!, since the kobold is this year’s plush.)
While both scheduled Monster Island events for this weekend are sold out, the rules and plush will be available in Dorkstock’s games library for play in the room (Waubesa – up on the second floor of the convention center) for anyone who feels a need for a silly kaiju battle.
Most years, after the mulberries are done for the season, I do a quick trim of the branches I can reach that are extending too far over the lawn. A couple key phrases in that sentence were “most” and “I can reach”… I am not particularly tall, and I never quite got around to bringing the ladder out each year to trim the higher branches. That resulted in quite a sprawl, particularly at the higher levels, that I didn’t really want to deal with myself, and a fruit tree that was taller than we wanted, primarily because we had no way to reach so much of that fruit.
If you’ve never had mulberries – and I personally have never seen them available uncooked in stores – you might be wondering why we didn’t just collect them when they fell. Mulberries are quite juicy, while resembling a small blackberry. I assume this juiciness is the reason for the lack of commercial availability; they don’t keep well. It also means that when they hit the ground, they immediately collect dirt. To be fair, this doesn’t stop the birds, rabbits, and other critters from eating them… we’re just a bit pickier.
I decided earlier in the summer to hire someone to trim the tree, rather than having to find the time to trim it and get the branches down to the appropriate size for the township’s branch pick-up. As you can see in this photo taken during the trimming, there were some sizable branches removed. Conveniently, my neighbor had hired a company, Paulo & Sons Tree Services (who can be reached here), mid-summer, when his branch overhanging my driveway cracked near the trunk. I kept their contact information, promising to reach out once the mulberry harvest ended for the season.
To be clear, our mulberry season usually finishes in July, nicely timed with our next wave of raspberries and strawberries, affording us the opportunity for some triple berry dishes. This has been a strange growing season in our garden – I picked a ripe strawberry today, in October, and saw another recently formed flower – and our mulberry harvest didn’t actually wind down until mid-September. In fact, the timing worked out nicely for the tree trimming to happen in cooler weather; it was still in the 80s last week. I’m hoping the raspberries are about done, so I can trim them before the branch pick-up ends for the season. (Edit: the raspberries said “I’m not dead yet!” So I ate some.) I’m happy with the trimmed mulberry, and glad someone else did the work.
The temperature blanket continues, of course, with another three months of warm weather added in the latest six rows. In this photo, that’s the left side, which has the occasional yellow (65-74) with more orange (75-84) and red (85-94). Fortunately, dark red’s only appearance, for temperatures 95 and above, was on the last travel day shown, when we flew back from Portland, Oregon as they started a heat wave.
When I started this blanket, I was working on the concept based solely on word-of-mouth, having heard the idea from friends at various points, including one who started her blanket in January. I recently stumbled on a Temperature/Weather Blanket group on Facebook and am in awe of the variety of different ideas for the same basic concept. Beyond the basic rows or granny squares (like mine) are the expanded ideas with lows and highs, sometimes as half of the same row, which makes for fascinating color blends. There are rows or squares as month dividers, special colors or add-ons to mark significant dates for the blanket’s owner (not necessarily the person doing the work), and squares per week or month, building out to longer rows later in the square. And it’s not all squares! There are hexes and flowers and circles all joined in appropriate ways. One layout I’m considering for the future is a calendar design – in addition to the squares for each day, there are filler squares to finish out the rectangle for a monthly calendar, along with a top row indicating the month, and then the months can be joined to form the larger blanket.
And that’s just the blankets! There are also weather snakes… same basic concept, a row per day of a crochet plush snake, which I have to say, is tempting for some future year. There are also embroidered designs, from a dozen cat silhouettes in a variety of colors to a daily temperature tree, which is available as a kit here. I am seriously considering that one for 2026, as a good way to improve my embroidery skills. Once I have more practice, I may consider an embroidery chart for something like the cats.
Which creative temperature idea fascinates you the most?
In a whirlwind of political controversy, the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show, a late-night talk show, was suddenly suspended “indefinitely” last week, then just as suddenly restarted, airing again on Tuesday, September 23rd. The cancellation was evidently a response to the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) appearing on a conservative commentator’s podcast and threatening the company that produces the show. (His threats went over so well that fellow Republicans were criticizing his comments as attacking free speech.) This sudden turnabout was undoubtedly due to the financial setbacks experience by the parent company… someone called Disney… as consumers took a stand, cancelling streaming subscriptions and vacations, apparently to the tune of several billion dollars lost in less than a week.
Until this week, I had never watched the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show. The entire concept is antithetical to my lifestyle… “late night” is something that I usually only experience at conventions, and I generally prefer to read news rather than watch it. Don’t get me wrong, I only altered half of that… I watched the episode on YouTube the morning after it aired. According to YouTube’s count, so have 15 million (and counting) other people, so I’d say it’s doing fairly well.
I almost feel bad for The Onion, faced with the outrageous reality that they’re competing with, and yet that same outrageous reality makes it easier for the late night comedians, including Jimmy Kimmel, to find easy targets. And with malfunctioning escalators (allegedly sabotage, rather than the reality of an emergency stop triggered by his own team) and teleprompter (again, run by his own team), you’d almost think this administration is trying to provide fodder for those late night shows.
What we saw was a successful boycott with a specific target – restoring the show – influencing a mega-corporation. Imagine what we could accomplish as a country if all of those consumers who have a strong opinion about free speech would vote.
As I mentioned recently, we needed a bit more mulch before the winter weather hits. After a couple weeks, I cancelled my Chip Drop request – I can always enter a new one – and bought some mulch after my garden planner said these magic words: “If we don’t mulch it, we need to sod lift the whole area.”
Yeah, I’d rather mulch it. Here’s the work in progress, starting with a perimeter mulch path at the edge, then a combination of sod removal and mulching. The areas where grass was removed are destined for more immediate planting of somewhat tall plants. We briefly considered a metal edging for the perimeter plant, so the mulch doesn’t wash into the neighbor’s grass when it rains, but realized how expensive that would get given that the entire north edge has a bit of a slope into his yard. We’re looking at a plastic edging instead.
A new pile of dark brown mulch – about 10 cubic yards – on our driveway, the day it was delivered.
A 2-foot wide line of mulch along the edge of our property in the northwest corner of our yard.
A mulched area around the lilac, with a small portion where we did sod lifting instead for upcoming planting.
A view from the side patio to the mulch pile, showing the recently mulched area and the remaining grass for the northwest corner, which will all be mulched over or removed.
The internet has been fairly vile this week, with videos of two different murders that occurred in the United States circulating: a violent stabbing in North Carolina and a targeted shooting at a college campus in Utah. You’ve probably seen more commentary about the second one, despite another school shooting in Colorado mere minutes later, because the person in question was famous/infamous (depending who you ask). Either way, most of the comments you’ll see online about it are pretty terrible, with many people celebrating the death and conspiracy theorists on the other side somehow naming every person who votes for the Democratic party as a murderer, despite not knowing who the murderer is or their motive. For anyone who thinks that way, please pull your collective heads out of your collective asses instead of painting a diverse group of people with a single label. Whatever the method or motive, senseless violence is wrong.
Ideally, I would have segued into a photo that involved both a head next to an ass here, but I typically don’t take photos of the cats in those particular poses. Instead, here’s a spattering of more delightful cat photos, in the hopes that they offer you a smile today and a brief refuge from whatever you need to hide from.
June, sitting on a blue tub next to our gaming table, with a plush Flying Spaghetti Monster lurking behind her.
Zuko lounged on our Gamefold table – folded, leaning against part of our games library.
Two cats, Arwen and June, sitting on a Hello Kitty blanket on the sofa.
Diane, mere inches from a water bowl, perches with front paws on the edge of a full bucket on the shower mat to drink.
One our perpetual summer projects is acquiring and distributing mulch around the yard, to help with weed suppression and generally improve the appearance of the yard. Earlier in the spring, I had a request in with GetChipDrop.com for wood chips, hoping to get a free (or close to free, with optional donation) supply of wood chips to mulch the yard. ChipDrop partners with local arborists and gardeners to mutual benefit: the arborists get somewhere local to drop the wood chips, and the gardeners don’t have to call every tree company or outright purchase mulch. It’s a simple process, but it doesn’t mean the availability of wood chips is sporadic. Each request is good for a month, and when we returned from the Canary Islands without having received wood chips, I bit the bullet and ordered mulch from a local supplier. (To be clear, their mulch is fabulous… but mulch is not cheap.)
The initial distribution wave went quickly – from delivery on May 3rd to the second photo on May 10th, we probably distributed half of the mulch. This was the easy phase, re-mulching areas that were mulched in previous years. You can see how good the fresh mulch looked around the raised vegetable beds. We have a large yard and progressed fairly quickly through those initial 10 cubic yards. I was quickly becoming concerned with other areas of the garden I wanted to mulch as I ran through the pile.
So, before clearing the entire pile, I placed a new request through GetChipDrop.com on a Friday… and received a response Saturday morning asking if I wanted a 15-yard delivery. Woot! It wasn’t until partway through distributing the refreshed pile that I named it “Mount Mulchmore.”
The process inevitably slowed, between some intolerably warm weather, my wasted time at PT, and our discussions as to which areas needed weeding before mulching and which should have landscape paper set down first. I expanded the back border to put more distance between myself and the poison ivy lingering under the neighbor’s white mulberry tree. And then, in mid-August, after mulching around the strawberry bed, I cleared the rest of the pile.
