(Lucy took this - just to prove she does sometimes wake up early, when it's worth it... <grin>)

Lil' yellow car parked outside the house (which you can't see, but is to the right).

The "liquid amber" trees (red things on the right) are turning.

Two nights ago, Patrick came home and found two young foxes gambolling on the terrace area next to the house. They paused briefly to check him out when he first pulled up, but then ignored him and carried on romping.

After a few days of torrential rain, the weather has turned lovely again, and Patrick and I snuck up to Georgetown on Saturday morning in the Fiat to get coffee and buns. I've been using this car to commute in, driving with the top down, in the dark  (even during the foggy nights) - all bundled up. There must be a meteor shower going on, because two nights in a row I saw shooting stars as big as fireworks.

The random debris spread around us is all the stuff we haven't had a chance to deal with yet: the green mailbox and its post still need to be installed by the gate down on the road before postie can deliver any letters to us; the screen door needs rescreening and revarnishing and having the hinges swapped to the other side, at which point we can install it outside the back door so that we can leave it open without losing all our cats (as we nearly did last weekend, when we came home and discovered we hadn't shut the back door properly and it had been open all day... thankfully, we'd only lost one cat, and she was retrieved from her expedition outside); the post hole digger (two handles poking up to the left of me) will probably be returned to its owner - we've discovered the local hardware store has a petrol driven post-hole digger (one on a stand, instead of the type you have to hold onto with four arms and be whipped around with when it catches) which we can rent for about $50 for 3 hours.

I'm standing in the "terraced part" - where pft saw the foxes. This is going to be the #1 horse field we fence and the one where they mostly eat and sleep.

The hood I'm wearing on my head is a fleecy one I made myself. The reason I'm wearing it has nothing to do with cold - infact, in all those clothes I was much too hot. It is to keep the tiny hairs out of my mouth when I'm driving along. This is the part of convertible owning that they never show in the films - the bit where you are beaten to death by your own hair from the wind.