autumn approachs

Here in Ottawa, autumn approaches. A cold front came through last night and today is a wonderful windy, rainy, cool and overall elemental kind of day. I love it. Fall is my favourite season.

I had the kind of weekend that at the end leaves you in disbelief at how much you accomplished. I cleaned windows, dusted (really dusted, you know - when you actually remove the stuff from the shelf instead of just dusting around it), potted up several house plants, harvested garden veggies, created harvest displays for outside (nothing fancy - just some of my pumpkins, potted mums and gourds), created fantastic advertising material for distribution, and I even baked a delicious peach pie. The pie was one summer treat that I thought I had missed this year but last week I bought a basket of end of season peaches and yippee, there was peach pie in the house. I must confess that I make fantastic pie crust. And I like my pie with spices - so I added lots of ginger, nutmeg and allspice to the peaches. Yummy.

Now before you hate me because I make great pie crust, please know that this skill only came with lots of practice. My first pie crust was wonderful - beginner's luck. The next was wretched. I kept at it, tried different recipes, I even doubled a normal two crust pie recipe as I had so much difficulty rolling out the lesser amount of dough. Ah but practice finally won out. For an interesting take on the concept of practicing, check out Jeanette Jobson's blog entry from September 11, 2008, entitled "eating the cold porridge".

Early this morning, as I was feeling autumn approaching, :-) I wanted to put on some appropriate music. What do you consider autumnal music? Do you have any suggestions? Think beyond Vivaldi's The Four Seasons (as wonderful as that is). I ended up putting on a CD by a Vermont composer and guitarist, Spencer Lewis - the kind of artist who sells his CDs at local shops and at the general store. I bought several of his CDs while visiting Vermont during the fall a few years ago. I listened to the CDs while we were on vacation and of course now his music is associated with that time of year.

Tonight is opera night!! We have tickets to see Marriage of Figaro. Three hours of surround sound Mozart, from the orchestra pit to the singers on stage. Fabulous. If you would like to know more about Ottawa's opera company, just click here: Opera Lyra.

I am heading back to my studio. I just need to put some final strokes onto the background of the lily.