Cold Weather Ramblings

 It's been cold here for the past few days. Noticeably cold. Cold so that even the Boy Who Wears Shorts All Year Long has taken to wearing jeans once in a while. The only real upside to all this cold is that it's sunny most days.

Here is a picture of a chocolate cake. A chocolate cake I gave away. It was part of a fundraiser at Max's school. FDPG and Dominic couldn't figure out why I would spend SO MUCH TIME baking and icing a chocolate cake that they would not be eating. I might have wondered the same thing once or twice, but it was still fun packaging it up in a proper cake box and taking it into the school.

 The last of the summer tomatoes. Look at them: they look so fresh, don't they? You'd never know that they were green nubs on the vines that I hauled up at summer's end, destined for the compost bin. They've been sitting in the window frame on the deck for the past 3 months, ripening veeerrrrryyyyy slowly.

 Mason bee cocoons sitting in a bleach solution. This is the time to open up your bee houses and clean them out. I was rather Darwinian about the idea of cleaning bee cocoons at first, but after watching several generations of bees get chewed to tragic extinction by mites, I now do the Excavate & Rinse Then Bleach routine. It's neither fun nor amusing, but the survival rate is significant enough to keep me at it. In fact, you'll be surprised what survives the bleach routine. I've got a portable little magnifier, so I can see them all. Weird AND gross.

 With all the cold weather we've been having, Toffee has been spending more and more time indoors, mostly hiding in out of the way places where we can't find him and toss him outside. Today he spent approximately 7 and a half minutes in the Great Outdoors. Three of them scratching at the door to be let in again.