Welcome to The City of Desire.

I am not pleased!

It's not like it's never happened before. The last time I remember getting a snowstorm in October I was a little kid in elementary school and always looked forward to snow days and 90-minute delays. Not anymore. Now all I can thinking about is shoveling, shoveling, shoveling and dangerous road conditions. Bleh!

We're slightly more prepared than we were last year. We still don't have a snow blower, but we do have a genuine lightweight, twenty-foot-long Snow Rake. I hope we don't have to use it yet! Compared to the storms we got last winter, six inches of snow is nothing. Unless, of course, we get more like twelve. Ugh, ugh, ugh.

It can't be as bad as that three-footer we got last January! We had blueberry pie to console ourselves that time, and this time we'll have apple! I hope that apple pie works as a good luck charm...

A Purple Cloud., a photo by Leenechan on Flickr.

I love these so much that I can't stop photographing them! Here's a picture of "Bluebird" in full bloom. I learned recently that it's no longer referred to as a "New England Aster" but a "Smooth Aster." I'm not sure what the difference is.

This morning I saw what I presumed to be a rabbit nibbling at the base of one of the aster plants. It turned out to be a squirrel burying a stash of acorns for the winter! I had actually dug up one of those stashes yesterday when I was digging out the bed for "Aptos." I felt kind of bad about it. It's pretty funny because we don't have any oak trees on our property. I keep seeing squirrels running across the street to get the acorns from our neighbors' oak trees and coming back to bury them in our yard! I wonder if so many animals hide their stashes of winter food in our yard because we're one of the only households on the street that don't have dogs outside?

Watched two silent films last night which thankfully didn't have to be reconstructed with production stills like London After Midnight. The first was the classic horror movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It was only 67 minutes long and grainy in spots, but I thought it was a pretty unique and disturbing film. Apparently, Conrad Veidt's character Cesare was Tim Burton's inspiration for Edward Scissorhands...

The second movie was Kiki, starring Norma Talmadge and Ronald Colman. Comedic silent films usually miss the mark with me, but I thought this one was hilarious! I was especially interested because I'd already seen Ronald Colman in two "talkies," The Prisoner of Zenda and Lost Horizon. I was prepared to see him in heavy makeup, mugging and gesticulating wildly, but he was just the same as he was in the later films, just with no sound. I can see how a lot of movie-goers found him appealing in the silent film era. He was so dignified!

Japanese Anemone "Honorine Jobert.", a photo by Leenechan on Flickr.

I've been having the hardest time taking a picture of this Japanese anemone. Like most springy, long-stemmed plants, they bounce around like mad in the slightest breeze. This is one of the runners we transplanted last summer. I'm glad that it still hasn't reached its max height of four to five feet yet. I wonder if planting this on the side of the front walkway was a great idea?

The Japanese anemones, Snowpuff cosmos and butterfly bushes are going to pull us through the fall. Everything else is pretty much done. I've pulled up cosmos "Cosimo Sparkling Wine" already; it had burned itself out by the last week of August. The tomatoes are gone too...but the Fairy Tale eggplants are continuing to produce. God, I love those plants. I got six of them and they still don't produce enough fruit for me!

Not much else to report...we made our first peach pie this weekend and it was pretty terrific. The credit goes to Kristen, of course. She's the one who can make pie crust. I just cut up the peaches and brushed egg white wash on the crust before we put the pie in the oven. XD

So Kristen and I were hanging out in the basement last night watching Sanjuro off the DV-R when we heard a very loud explosion in the laundry room. At first Kristen thought it was the furnace, which is located at the far left of the room and is prone to all sorts of malfunctions. I didn't think so, because I didn't smell smoke, and when the furnace has mishaps it makes a very different kind of boom. I thought it might have been coming from the downstairs bathroom. The toilet pump, maybe? Everything seemed normal around there. I went upstairs to see if anyone (like Lucas) had knocked something over that only made a sound like an explosion. Nothing.

So just as we were about to work ourselves into a full panic, Kristen mentioned that it kind of sounded like a soda can exploding, like they sometimes do when the refrigerator is too cold and they freeze. I checked the downstairs refrigerator and found a can of Diet Coke with Lime blown out in the back of the bottom shelf. There was Coke-colored slush all over the inside of the fridge. XD

Apparently, we had forgotten to replace the thermometer in the fridge. It's 24 degrees in there. This morning when I was upstairs washing dishes I heard another can explode. Holy crap. I haven't had that happen since the microfridge I kept in my college dorm froze all my seltzer water!

Now that "Honeycomb" is sleeping soundly in its bed, I must contemplate the fact that once autumn rolls around we're going to have ten butterfly bushes growing in our yard.

I think they really are a benefit. After all, not only do they attract beautiful butterflies and hummingbirds, but also the bees that later move on to pollinate our raspberries and potted vegetables. What would happen if we didn't have bees pollinating our stuff? We'd have to pollinate it by hand, wouldn't we?

The "Anne" raspberries are ripening to a pretty golden yellow. All three of them. That's right! Since we only planted those yellow raspberry bushes this spring, they're only giving us three raspberries this summer. ::snickers:: I will take a picture of those raspberries when they ripen.

I swear, the Fairy Tale Eggplants are growing at a rate of an inch a day. How cool! So far we have five on the plants. I'm praying that tomorrow's potentially heavy rain doesn't knock them off their stalks!

"Imperial Pink" has a big fat flower bud that's getting ready to open. It looks like Kermit the Frog without eyes.

Four "Weird Poppies" have survived the summer so far. I'm very interested in seeing if these plants that came from free seeds actually bloom.

I think the robin living in our Rose of Sharon only had one chick this time. It looks to be about a week old. It's so cute to see its tiny face peeking out from beneath its mama's red breast. I have to get careful about standing too close to the nest, though. Both the mama and her mate have tried to do the angry bird rush on me before. I think they're just paranoid because the mockingbirds keep trying to chase them out of the tree, but still...I ought not to push it. I'll just peek on them from the window.

I had to take a break from rerooting my Raili because I hurt my back somehow. I thought I ought to not exercise for a few days, but strangely enough it feels good to stretch it out. Maybe I slept it on wrong...

The survival guide we have lying around in our basement says that if we have a major disaster that destroys the infrastructure of our society, all the people living the suburbs will be growing food in their gardens while the city folk starve to death. I wonder if I can sneak some carrot plants into the ground somewhere?