It's a disease like spring fever. When the trees get like this, I have to collect leaves and scan them or try to paint or something. The fall foliage is too beautiful and too fleeting to ignore. When I was in college in western Massachusetts we used to laugh at the long lines of traffic with the leaf lookers in the fall. Now that I don't get to see the red and yellow hillsides every day on my way to class, I understand why it's worth putting up with that traffic to see the leaves.
Arlene's cousin Diane and her daughter Heidi were here over the weekend to go to a bridal shower in Concord. They had driven from near Buffalo. Heidi stayed with a friend at BU. We don't get to see these people much, but Arlene was always very close to Diane's family when they were kids. We were visiting Diane's sister Mira in Albuquerque (her picture is on that same link above) on our tenth wedding anniversary when the phone rang with the news that Heidi had been born.
We were hanging around on Friday evening to wait for the repairman (“service technician”) from the gas company to look at our boiler. I've been sensitive about that since the first winter we lived here, when some friends kids were visiting one day in December and our heat wouldn't go on. It turned out that I had let the water get too low in the boiler and a low-water sensor had shut the system down -- a good thing, said the guy who came out to fix it, because the boiler could explode if it ran without water in the system and then some water hit the hot part and flashed into steam. It turns out that the low water cutoff has a little float that operates a relay to turn the boiler on and off as the water gets higher or lower, but the float gets all gooked up with rust and scale that's inside the pipes. I usually am good about draining dirty water out of the system every week in the winter to keep it from getting too icky, but over the summer I forget and the valve didn't seem to be operating right. It turned out on Friday that all the technician had to do was to thump on the side of the valve housing with his hand and flush water through a few times to get it operating right.
Besides talking to Diane a lot and looking at her pictures of Italy from her vacation this summer, I did a lot of block printing. I'm late sending my postcards in to a swap of handstamped postcards, the architectural swap run by Christiane Eichler of Cologne, Germany. I finished stamping up those. Here's what they look like --
Jackson Homestead, 1809.
Was a stop on the underground railroad.
There's a series of folk music concerts in the backyard every summer.
Looks as though one is going on now.
and started printing the cards for the next swap, Christiane's repetitive nothing project. I'm trying to learn to do reduction block printing and am pleased so far.
We walked on Saturday out at Cold Spring park in Newton, not remarkable, but that's where the leaves on this page came from.
On Sunday morning Heidi and her friend Katie from BU came over for brunch. I'm always happy for any reason to get some smoked fish from the deli, and I cooked a mushroom omelet too and baked a batch of cran-bran muffins (that would be bran muffins with a bunch of cranberries instead of raisins). I love big breakfasts and an excuse to make them. Combine that menu with a bunch of fresh bagels and you have the picture.
Anne came over a little later with her former roommate from Moscow, also named Ann. We had gone out to dinner with Anne and Ann at a Georgian restaurant in Moscow in the summer of '98, and Ann had traveled with Charley and Anne in Thailand a year ago. It's always mind-blowing to see someone again whom you met on the other side of the world!
After everyone left Arlene & I went out to Horn Pond in Woburn for a walk. A red-tailed hawk landed in a tree about 20 feet away from us. Arlene looked at it and said “Look at its big claws!” I looked and said, “Look at its big chipmunk!” Sure enough, it had just caught a chipmunk and was deciding how best to tear it apart. A couple of crows chased it away before the picture got too gross. There were lots of mallards, several widgeon, a couple of Canada geese, three swans (one immature? gray/tan, anyway), and a gadwall in the water and a great blue heron, very scrawny, on the other side of a small section of the pond. We got 7/8 of the way around the pond before seeing any small land birds, but there were a couple of kinglets, myrtle warblers, one other warbler, a phoebe, and lots of robins.
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