Sunday, October 31 — It’s sunny outside and I really wanna be out in it, so this will be short. Man, what a beautiful fall so far! We had time to get the crops in, debris off the gardens, and most of the gardens tilled up so far. All that’s really left is the little patch of flax. I don’t know whether I’ll mess with it this fall. I had the idea that I’d experiment with turning flax into linen fibre. For lack of anything else to do with it, I had thought I’d spin it into twine. Great idea, but of course there are a few processing tools I shoulda been building last summer. Sigh. I may just yank it up and toss it in the compost heap.

Time to prep the tractor for winter: oil and hydraulic fluid and filters, drop the bucket and hook up the snow blade, cuss and mutter and skin my knuckles to get the chains on. That’s next week’s project. I kind of hope for a heavy snow year, because I’m not going to be sitting out in the weather with snot freezing in my beard at -25, plowing the lane in the dark. Nice warm cab, CBC on the radio, oodles of horsepower. I think I could get used to that. Anybody who wants to complain about it is encouraged to come out and shovel my lane for me. I’ll give you a shot of Screech afterward.