Oven cleaning
I locked the oven door and set the self-cleaning timer to two hours, a light cleaning. I have to bake two dozen yellow cupcakes some time this weekend for the upcoming Halloween party for DHMC families. Two dozen is not too many: other partners are baking them as well. We hope to have sixty cupcakes for the children to decorate, and eat, at the party. But, as my oven has a tendency to set off the smoke alarm everytime I use it, I thought it best to spare Roger from having to wave away invisible smoke and thoroughly clean the thing before baking.
With two hours to kill on this semi-bright autumn morning, and Roger due home from call within that time (upon which, after the oven is cleaned, we will breakfast somewhere downtown), I thought I'd pass some time blogging. The site has been neglected long enough.
Big Bird is in my backyard. He is actually a curiously large patch of yellow and orange leaves among a sea of evergreen that has colored overnight in our wooded backyard. I can't tell if these bright leaves are all from one tree, or if they are from branches of different trees growing close together. But they take a shape that resembles the back of that huge, friendly bird. With my glasses off, the colors make me think it is he, parting the pine trees and peeking into the forest. Is he looking at the brook, which we have heard but not yet seen? Or has he lost a red ball down the steep incline? Maybe he has found remnants of our old Christmas tree, which Roger, with the help of our neighbor, had chopped up with a hatchet and tossed into this same forest about ten months ago.
This furious patch of color is a more brillant example of foliage than I have yet to see around here. The hills and mountains are filled with oranges and yellows and purples, but they are not extraordinary or bright in the way I had imagined they would be. They are more like an antique quilt of color, muted, perhaps by the mist and fog, but not mesmerizing me or making me think I had been transported to Oz. Perhaps the best foliage comes in pockets, and I shouldn't expect to see acres and acres of rainbow colors. Maybe when the sun becomes more prominent this fall, its rays will hit the trees in such a way as to floor me. I'm waiting for that.
