Autumn is truly here

I got an audio book from Audible today, for the Autumn season … it’s not a “Halloween” thing, we “don’t do halloween”. It’s a spooky audio book though.

The cool weather has finally arrived. It was unseasonably warm (really hot) just the other week, and the last four or five days has been heavenly. Tonight we have frost advisories out and just to the north in the more mountainous areas there are freeze warnings.

I find that I have come alive now that Autumn is here in truth and spirit. Summer is nice (when in A/C), but it puts me in doldrum mode moreso than not overall, dulled senses. Autumn means I can wear boots and heavier skirts and I LIKE that, for some reason, though I am a very sensitive person to too many layers, itchy seams, bulky seams, ick ugh gooky yuk.

In this vein I like cashmere, thin soft sweaters made of cashmere are so ultra lightweight and oh so very warm.

Silk mixed with cotton or cashmere or wool makes for a nice garment. In the south the cotton mix is alright for some things, but you Northern-Clime folks, don’t do cotton. Due wool and silk.

Pure silk is pure heaven. Silk dresses, skirts, hosiery, underthings, blouses. Ah, so sweet and warming, light and soft and silky. I have a few silk things, not quite what I deem as what I really need though. The few things are better than none though.

Wool can be itchy, so silk underneath and wool overtop are nice mates.

So in summer-time lighter clothing can be worn, barefoot-ness in the house and yard is nice, but I don’t like the overall heat of the days, and the whole thing gets old after awhile. The cold of Autumn and Winter can be drudgery when it comes to putting on the clothes needed to outdoors, and to keep warm in a colder house if you have one (as we do). But it’s aliveness, it’s senses undulled, not dulled at all, so very brimming with life and energy. It’s the intellect sparking. That’s what it is. That’s why I like the colder weather so much, I guess. It IS because I like the cool, I respond well to it, but it’s the underlying how real do I feel, the real me, my mind … Ah yes, the cold is my friend, it aides the real me in appearing.

As long as the conditions are right.

What can dull me during winter … buildings with artificial heat. Like at church. In some stores. In some peoples cars. In some peoples houses.

What happens to me is: my sinuses close up, gooky or dry and I can’t barely breath, all the while that is happening I yawn and start getting sleepier and sleepier and sleepier … it’s my mind, it sinks far away into the depths of the folds of oblivion. lolling tongue feeling.

Give me the freezing air, let me wear the light warm clothing to keep my body warm enough and give me that cool to cold air to breathe… it is full of life, and the heated air feels nearly depleted of oxygen.

Falsely cooled (A/C) buildings seem devoid of air unless the system is moving air all of the time.

What it feels to me like is slow suffocation.

I have no such problem with my house in the winter. In the old days we had a heat pump and it couldn’t keep our house warm … good job it did. It’s a gentler heat and less stuffy even if it does warm up the house, but it’s still better all around for the air to be natural as possible … we don’t use that now, it broke. The fireplace we use, it makes a nice heat that is natural and doesn’t fill up even one room, but takes the edge of cold off nicely. The air is full of breathability. 🙂 With the heatpump we used the fireplace before, so the heatpump not being used is only the corners of the house that are left without help … and an electric space heater here and there help out when it worse out (like the days of low 30’s or 20’s and no sun for days and day [2 or more]). I like it when it snows or ices over. Everything stops and it gets warmer in the house. I mean, there’s no going anywhere, no one out there moving about, and the house gets warmer from the insulation of the whole region from snow or ice.

We live in Georgia, so it’s not a whole season of snow and ice, but fits and starts of it, then it goes away and mild cold days reign again, till another ice storm comes. We get cold weather in October sometimes, but mostly it awaits November, and we sometimes get some flurries or snow before the end of the year. It’s usually January though, mid or later, when the weather gets seriously icy or snowy. Last year it wasn’t until February. Overall last year was a very mild winter for us.

I’m just thrilled that the weather has changed finally. The trees that still have leaves (some dropped them or part of them in September, curiously) are beginning to really start to show colours changing. Peak colour is usually mid-November. Right on schedule now.

My hens are mostly all molting again. They were laying great just a few weeks ago, then suddenly dropped to only one hen laying, then she quit after a week or so of solo laying. Then about a week ago Hawklady started to lay every other day and a few days in a row as well, with nothing today, but yesterday and the day before, yes. (she’s still in her own little overturned basket area.)

The Leghorns have a flood of white fluff in their pen. The other hens have a sea of mostly black and a little bit of brown fluff all about them (Autralorps and Golden-laced Wyandottes)

I still want to get a pen made for just the Wyandottes and Hawklady, that’d be three of them. It seems nice to segregate them, they tend towards self looking behaviour. Really they do, in my backyard at least.

So it’s colder time and the Leghorns are now sleeping in their laying box, you can tell from all the feather and poop in their every morning. No more eggs being layed, so go for it ladies. Seven of them crammed in that there box.

So then, this weather, it’s bright and fluffy stuff, envigoration-ating. So what nice when it gets cooler, and darker sooner, but some good old-fashion spooky reading … and nothing like hearing it read to you.

This is the audio book I got today: Great Classic Hauntings: Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson and a couple more.

They are having a sale there on Audible.com, 50% off of many books, not all, just many. Each on-sale item has an orange pumpkin next to it. The book I got was a lower priced book and exactly what I had in mind to get, a selection of something, including Poe, but not limited to him, though I’m interested in getting more Poe-only audio books in the future.

So the days are less light, well, very light and bright indeed, but less of it time-wise. This next weekend is when the clocks change for us from EDT to EST. Then it’ll be darker earlier in the evening. It has seemed like the last month the light has gone noticeably earlier, so that the time change will make it shockingly earlier. It’s mostly the lack of light we have in the house due to removing our deck French doors this year. It darkened things up intensely. We had a window A/C unit in over the sink and just took that out today, so now we have a smidgen more light in here again. (House back faces South) It’ll be interesting to see how it feels, light-wise, in here after a few more days of a window view there again, before the Fall Backwards-ness of time on Sunday early AM.