Monthly Archives: October 2005

Autumn is truly here

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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.

We have a new store near-by

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We just got a new store a few miles away. There was a K-Mart there before, but it’s one that closed when they closed a bunch of their stores some time ago. The space is nearly filled now, as store after store slowly has taken up part of the empty space. We have the first PEEBLES in the state, and had some shopping there this afternoon. Frankie had gone in the other day and told me about it.

We found a few nice cute things for V., who turns 7 in about a month. We found some nice shirts for the two boys as well. Nice sale going on, by two get one free on some things, as well as a Grand Opening percentage-off of everything.

They have some nice brands, good stuff, over all a better store than K-Mart, though they don’t take K’s place at all, P is a “department store” kind of place, and K is not that, less and more all over. Cheaper and full of many other things, in other words. P is pretty nice, consitering it all. My take on it is, uh oh. Why did they pick HERE to put their first store? :) Maybe it’s growing faster around here than we even thought. Hmmm.

Anyhow, we also got a new winter play coat for V. and some funny pink boots she can wear this winter, with her casual skirts, and maybe play outside too. Things are good quality there, but not over priced, and better prices due to Grand Opening. The things are not what I’d really want to get over anything, but what available close to home, so …

I got three new blouses and a couple of jackets as well. Now there is where I had to laugh. I looked in the Misses stuff and found NOTHING. I passed the Jr. section and stopped short in front of a rack of really cute baby-cord blazers. Two colors, one a tan-ish and the other a dusty rose-ish … I pulled out a M in the pink and tried it on right in the aisle, not exactly my “INTP style” to do that usually, ;) and oooooh I loved it!

I used to where Jr. sizes, before babies. Since then, I haven’t been happy with much in Misses, and well I was just thrilled to find a really hot blazer that fit me. It’s snug in the middle and so vvveeerrrrry feminine, the waist is snugged in, as I sayed before, and it’s a girly blazer for sure. It’s something I didn’t ever have in my close closest, something that girly. I must say, when I was younger, they didn’t put nice things like that in the Jr. Dept. Lines of Clothing. I’m still a girl, just older and my shape is different. My take on it is that the styles out now are so very me, over all, this summer the skirts out there, and continuing into Fall and Winter things, they are so great, so similar but improved, so much like my childhood. Re-cycled styles … what comes around goes around. Nothing new under the sun, that sort of thing, just something old, improved.

For the last … I forget how many years, I’ve been wearing only dresses or skirt/blouse combos. I have had the worst time finding anything that either fit, or that I liked. I went through a “jumper” phase, it was all I could find that was “ok” and I’m glad I don’t HAVE to wear them anymore. I have found a few things here and there since then, and slowy got a better wardrobe going, though it’s not really “my style” overall. I’m struggling to get me into my clothes, I mean, get the real me to be in my real style. Skirts I have now, several nice types for me, but blouses has been my bain forever. I’ve never been good at blouses.

Before dresses, I was a T-shirt and Jeans girl. I wore dresses too, but mostly T-shirts and Jeans, Walking Shorts and Nice T’s, that sort of thing. I got more modesty though, and quit the pants wearing completely bad when ever that was. So for me, skirts are tough, they aren’t my usual style, before it was dresses of different styles, mostly not comfy types, so they didn’t work for me to go into my new clothing phase, as comfort is first for me in daily life ;)

So I was happy to find a couple of blazer/jacket things that work with some of the skirts I have now, which makes the blouse issue less of an issue, finally. Autumn/Winter is my favorite time for clothes, I can wear tights and boots and looser thick stuff. Layers that are good, not several, just a couple. I am very sensitive to too many layers, seams in many things, and all that. So I have to be picky about what I can wear ever, specially Winter. So now some of my things feel more complete since the P run today.

I’m guessing I’ll have to get more and more stuff as soon as I can, since styles will change, and they won’t be in my favor necessarily … get it while the gettin’s good!

So I re-looked at the Misses section in P before leaving. Ugh. Polyester reigns supreme there! Ugh! They had nothing of interest, nothing. Jr’s didn’t have any skirts I liked, almost, but not in the end. That’s OK, the upper stuff was good. I’m glad I looked, usually I have tried that in other stores and found nothing in either section. Just these last couple of style seasons has proved out anything good in little/big girls clothing and in Jr’s or Misses anywhere.

Of course, I am talking about less costly clothing … ready-to-wear off of cheaper store shelves. I have found a few things in Dillards in some sections at times, but there those are pricier things. All in all it’s that Peebles is something new for us, and it isn’t pretentious, and not a big mess either. It’ll be interesting to see what they are like later, see if they improve, get worse, stay the same, or what.

Well, I’m nearly ready for Winter. Really ready for Autumn, and it seems to be here now, the weather is cooling down, and tonight it should be in the high 40′s with low 70′s tomorrow and getting a bit cooler the next few days. I looked at the 15-day forcast, and it’s for a similar trend, just low 70′s at the highest with more highs lower than that, and lows down into the very high 30′s later. Beyond that, I don’t know. I used to rely on Accuweather and look that sort of data up via the past 12-month data, but they’ve removed that from the regular user interface, you have to pay extra for more data now. :( I haven’t looked for another source as of yet. I pay little things on a few other sites for content, and have no wish to do so with weather!

Oh, I did get a nice little program the other day, Moon Phase stuff [link] … it’s a thing you have to pay for, just once. You can look up past and future and current Moon Phase data … it’s really nice. I’m very interested in the moon and it’s influence on things.

I realized for the very first time via this program, that I was born the morning of a New Moon. I had thought I was born when the moon was “waxing” … as some other websites had said. So there I found, not really was it waxing, not really, it had turned to new at 12:30am … I was born at 8:27am.

Duran Duran has a song, which also fascinated me, I didn’t know why. Now I do. New Moon on Monday. I was born on a July Monday morning many years ago, under a New Moon.

Hey, means something to me, just interesting, I mean. Funny, I have something to connect with my fascination with that song now. FWIW :)

Getting a rare thing

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My Stryper – Reborn CD came in the mail today, the one from eBay, I think I wrote about it, maybe I didn’t before, in any case: It’s one of the first presses, that went out, but 3 songs were ordered wrong, so they re-pressed it with the right order, and that’s what most people have bought, only those buying it in the first “whatever time” like days … got the rare mixed up one.

So I have one now. Someone on eBay had several they were selling. Well, they didn’t say they CD’s had that dumb notch sawed into the bottom side of the spine. The new one I have does. But it’s fine, for the reasoning of rarities this and that, the disc can live in the other Stryper Reborn case.

All in all it’s not that big a deal, I will have to open the new one to do what I said, and that’s just it. I will have to do that and know that it matters not, to prove what the disc is, it must be played. The case is the same as the next pressing of it From What I Can Tell. I mean, there are not marks or numbers different from my look-overs so far. From what I can see about it, putting my INTP mind to it, I don’t see any reason for anything to be different, only the actual disc is not arranged the same as was supposed to be, so it’s just like old albums. One vinyl is bad, and one is good, one sleeve is good, and one is bad. Swap them out for ONE MINT. It’s not the same, just nearly so. In this case, the case is the same, the disc is different, only the disc. (to be confirmed later)

Spiders

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I’ve been watching a spider on our front porch of late. Actually maybe two. In mid-Summer I noticed, upon coming home from somewhere after dark, that there was a very large spider hanging in the upper left-hand back corner of the porch. It freaked me out at first, it was so grotesque to see it hanging there upside-down in an ugly mess of web that wasn’t any pattern at all, just a big cluster of nasty tangles. Watching it from then on I knew it was a night-habit spider, it hung there by night and by first light it was crammed as deep into the corner as it could get.

I got a decentish picture of it one night.

After some time, it dissapeared. It wasn’t there. I checked a few nights in a row, no sign of it anywhere. I didn’t know what kind of spider it was. I wasn’t able to ID it on the internet, for some reason.

I have since came to understand that it is a variety of a Common Orb Weaver, though that one just stayed up in the corner by itself. I haven’t yet found any info linking this type of spider to different habits as such … but here is the rest of the story.

After an absence of Spider on Porch for a few days or more, suddenly there was something new to see. Between the front posts to the railing on the right, looking out from the doorway, was a spider on a web.

The web was stretched beautifully between the posts. An OBVIOUS orb-weaver web. The spider prefers to sit in the middle when there is no work to be done, and has such a classic “spider” look hanging upsidedown like that on the web.

My ID of it as an Orb Weaver only really came for certain the other day, On Enature I was able to find “Common Orb Weaver” when previously I hadn’t been able to find it, for whatever reason. The actual picture they have is close enough to what my spiders have looked like.

The kicker is that both spiders I had on my porch looked alike, only the first one was bigger, the second one smaller. Their web habits were totally different though. In any case, if I get more info I’ll update this paragraph and other ones that need it.

I’ve taken photographs a few times now, of the active spider. Nighttime is a hard time to get a flash picture of a spider and web. Most of the pictures the spider is washed out in color, features not true to life, or totally nonexistent. I really like many of the photos, and it’ll be a hard task to decide WHICH ONES to put here. I can’t possibly put them all, half or even a quarter of them up here. I’ve taken a lot of photos :rolleyes: [having a fast SLR Digital is super! No wasted film, snap away all you want!]

I don’t have any special gadgets to work with my camera, so these are all just done using auto and manual settings on the dial of my Canon Digital Rebel, as well as manually focusing. I really need to dig out the old tripod, which has seen better days. I’ve only really used it with a video camera, and it’s gotten knocked around in our lack of storage house, and the legs might not stand up so good now. In any case, shake is one thing I need to get rid of in some of these shots, the lense is opened so long and they’d be gorgeous without the slight movements that makes for one super-multi-super-over-imposed spider.

I’ll work on getting some web versions of the web and spider pictures up here As Soon As I Can, but no promises for today, though I might be able to pressure myself into it. :)

I’m getting hyped up on learning more about spiders I encounter and this is the first one to really get me super-active in watching and snapping pictures. We watch when we can at night, and hope for a moth to fly into the web, and we’ve see a few, and one time it was a moth bigger than the spider, a hairy brown moth. Ick. She, the spider, I’m calling it a she for now, jumped right on him immediately, and started to spin him around and around. I got closer and sure enough I could see her silk coming out, multiple strands like ia wide connected band of filaments, it was really interesting. The children were with me and saw it too. After a bit of spinning the moth took on a mummified appearance, being encased completely in spider silk. The spider then grabbed the moth package a bit different, and quickly climbed up her web with it, to the middle. She put the package down and did something to attach it there, then did what looked like a favorite meal, started to “whatever” the package to eat out the juice of the moth, if that’s what she does. Entirely facinating it was. I didn’t take pictures then. I recorded it with the video in my head. I can relive it anytime I want, anywhere I would be. :)

My Package Came!

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My Stryper.com order came today. :)

The buttons are nice, little ones that will look nice on a collar, on a Jean Jacket, etc. One black, one white, with the “classic” Stryper logo.

The T-shirt is nice. Girly Black shirt with the “classic” Stryper logo.

And last but definitely NOT least … Stryper Reborn LP, yes, vinyl. :)

I am not going to open the LP, not at this time, at least. I have the CD and that’s what I’ll continue to listen to for now.

I see on eBay that there are people selling the first press of the Reborn CD. Three tracks were printed out of order … the mistake wasn’t realized until they shipped already. So there are some on the street. I found their new album too late, way over a month too late :”rolleyes: to find one of the first presses.

On eBay they aren’t expensive though. Right now it’s a wait-n-see bit about whether or not to go for one. They are enhanced CD’s though, the one I have is not.

This comes to the point of what I’m doing. Certain books and music I’m starting to become a collector of. Nothing superior or anything. Just good old something I really like.

So that means I need to find good copies of anything I do not have from the past. The biggest thing about it is I need to fund this somehow, and really need to start selling on eBay again. I have sold a few things, way back when, then nothing else. I really have very little of value to sell, so I need money to make money.

I’m glad to see my package has arrived though, I’ve been keeping a keen eye on each day and wishing and hoping … and today finally was the day. :)