I've Written an Encyclopedia

Olga explores the autumnal garden

Well, I went out yesterday to take a look at the dahlias, in preparation for lifting the tubers, and they all still have leaves -- in some cases quite a lot of leaves. They're still big and bushy. Which makes me think it's too early to lift them. I'm going to hold off another week or two. There's no frost in the forecast, so no rush.

Instead of lifting dahlias, I lifted the bed in our bedroom and performed my semi-annual cleaning beneath it, including vacuuming up a Sahara's worth of dust and combing through Dave's ridiculously large and cobwebby collection of shoes. He owns about 15 pairs and wears about three. He did agree to get rid of some of them, which is progress.

I also changed the sheets and towels and took everything to the laundry, vacuumed the rest of the house and took care of all the plants. Look!

That's our light pink Thanksgiving cactus, which grew from a cutting that blog reader Frances sent me a couple of years ago. It's got lots of buds this year and seems to be prospering.

Remember the prayer plant I repotted a couple of weeks ago? Suddenly it has a little crop of mushrooms growing in the pot. Hmmmm...maybe I'm keeping it too damp! The plant seems happy, though, and has several new leaves.

In the afternoon, after reading some Dickens and eating a bizarre leftover-driven lunch (basically refried beans on toast), I took Olga to the cemetery. She chased her ball and had a good time. No sign of the turaco -- it has vanished once again to wherever it goes in the winter.

Here's a strange story. This place took over a vacant shopfront near Fortune Green way back in the spring. The owners brought in furniture, erected a nice sign and put in a bunch of planters and filled them with beautiful flowers. And then -- nothing. For months, every time I passed this place, it was locked up and there were no signs of life. Last week I did actually see a human being inside the shop, but the furniture is still stored haphazardly, the windows are filthy and I have yet to see any baked goods.

In a sign of how unreliable Google reviews are, I was amused to find two reviews for this place. One of them gave it five stars merely for existing, and the other gave it three stars and said "the bakery was excellent and good but the windows looked very dirty." I don't see how that person could have a clue how good the bakery is, unless it was actually open for about five minutes at some point and I missed it.

Anyway, it's a mystery. They seem in no rush to open, or if they are open, to make that more apparent.

This morning, when I opened my e-mail, an ad for Maserati cars popped up. I must have triggered some algorithm by being a fifty-something male who's likely to be having a mid-life crisis. That's better than some of the spam e-mail I got, including one with the subject line, "Four signs that parasites are living in your body." Maybe they know I was in the Peace Corps?

Oh, and Fresca recently posted an interesting link to a company that will turn a blog into a book. You can upload a blog's URL and they'll show you a sample of the printed version and tell you how much the whole job would cost. In my case, it would cost $3,294.78 to print my blog in 24 volumes. HA!