I am home alone for a few days because Dad is over in Winsted helping put the new shingles on. I hope he is having fun.

I am getting a lot done. Yesterday I got home in the early afternoon and it was so beautiful outside that I was feeling really motivated. So I cleaned out the chicken house for the winter, then thought I would start on the goat stall, which hasn’t been cleaned out since early last winter. It was a “back breaking” job because you can’t stand up in the stall even when there isn’t 8″ of *** on the floor. So I would work a while, then squat down to straighten my back, then work some more. Getting it out was not too hard, because I just pitched it out the open window into the waiting wheelbarrow. That also meant that I got to straighten up pretty frequently when I went out to haul the wheelbarrow to the middle of the garden and dump it. Once I got the hang of it (figuring how to maneuver the long handles in that small space was the biggest challenge!), I just keep chugging along until it was finished. I hadn’t thought I would be able to do it all in one day, but I did! And I am so excited to have it ready for the winter!

In the evening I headed out to my favorite Friday fish fry place for supper, to find out that they had closed on October 31. Bummer! So I came home and had leftovers and studied in the evening. Then I watched two of my new Feature Films for Families movies. Both were very good. I’ll loan them to whoever wants.

Today I made a long list and it is noon and I am right on schedule. I took the rest of the windows to the dumps, raked up some still-green leaves (see picture below) for the goats, bagged all the dried walnuts and brought them to 126 and closed up the greenhouse for the winter, studied an hour, boxed more stuff upstairs and hauled it over to the 117 upstairs (another hard job!) and am now on lunch break!

Here is a picture of what I found when I got home from work yesterday. Mind you, none of those leaves were there when I left about 5 hours earlier! (kind of spooky with the shadow, don’t you think?) And they don’t seem to have blown off, because they are in a nice even layer totally covering the ground directly beneath the tree.  I wish I would have seen them fall.