Well, then. Where were we?

I'm in the midst of one of those periods where there's just so much going on that my inner monologue has fallen rather quiet and isn't producing a linear narrative. I'm sure I'll snap out of it, once I get through the next couple of weeks. I'm really looking forward to Thanksgiving this year - I'll be almost finished with teaching (just a lab final to administer), and I'm going to go up to Minnesota with scrottie, so there will be travel and sight-seeing and a decided lack-of-work.

My poor ants. I finally got some time to start working on caring for them today, although at the expense of helping an undergrad put the finishing touches on a Giant Ant Farm (yes, there will be photos once it has ants in it). We'll finish it up on Monday instead. In the meantime, colonies that had grown desperate for space have now gotten it (for the most part), and they might even get fed tomorrow as well. Lucky ladies.

And in the garden. Well, I should tell you about some adventures on Monday and Tuesday first. Tuesday was sblat's birthday, so she and DM spent the day having adventures. In the late afternoon, they came over for some tea and birthday cake. The cake was a special chocolate affair that was truly a group effort; the entire Scrabble Society helped with it on Monday night, and then scrottie, trifold_flame and I put the finishing touches on it before L and DM showed up. It involved two different kinds of ganache and some artistic flair. After we ate cake, we simply had to go out to the back yard to play with the chickens.

While we were in the back yard, my friend M came over to drop off some compost (we have around four households contributing to our heap - pretty amazing!), and we were inspired to put the chickens on the compost heap so they could eat the compost grubs. There's something vaguely pleasant about just watching the chickens eat; L pointed out that it's much like watching a crackling fire. And boy did they ever make short work of the grub collection. When we put them back into the coop, they all cleaned their beaks on the straw, in a fashion that reminded me of a person cleaning off a knife or sword. Neat animals (for some fairly dumb birds).

This morning, I finally took a few extra minutes to put part of the giant shitmanure-pile into some square wooden frame-things to start up some lettuce seeds. The frame-things have these mesh covers that should help keep out the birds, who seem to love tasty tender green things. With any luck, we'll have lettuce just in time for me to head off for the holidays. The tomato plants also have little flowers, so we might even have some tomatoes by then as well, as long as we don't get much/any frost. This is the first year that I've had a chance to start fall crops, and it's all still kind of strange to me. The basil doesn't seem to mind; we are going to have a basil forest pretty soon as well. Italian feasts for everyone!