Changing Seasons

I'm attending an evening session of beginning tai chi and like to go to the school early so I can watch the Washu kids.  Washu is a form of martial arts and these are the beginning students.  They're fun to watch and it's encouraging to me.

Master Chen is teaching more than martial arts.  He talks to them about body, mind and spirit.  Neither Ian nor I ever anticipated that tai chi would become such a large part of our lives when we signed up last January for the five-week introductory class through the community class.  Interest is growing and last week was the beginning of COCC's fall five-week session.  The classes are packed!

 I had never seen vine maple before we moved here and these beauties are everywhere.  Our yard is filled with color and migrating birds. This week marks our first anniversary in this house.

Temperatures are still pretty moderate and since we haven't had a hard frost yet our yard is still in the changing over stage, different trees and shrubs are losing their leaves at different rates.  Our huge aspen tree is just beginning to turn but our red maple has lost all it's leaves. And that shrink-wrapped stuff on palettes is our firewood.  The guy we bought it from brought it in from the road on a forklift.  No cutting and stacking for us this year!

These trees belong to a neighbor down the street.  He's going to have a lot of leaves to rake and I'm so glad it's him and not us!  We have plenty already but Ian is trying to do a little at a time to keep up.

The towels are finished and I'm never repeating this colorway again.  It's the last project and with a few housekeeping items, I'm ready for the holiday sale in two weeks.  It's a first-time event.  I'm sharing booth space with two other weavers and have no idea how we'll even set up.  I'm looking at it as a trial run for next year.

This is Ponderosa Elementary School and it's where I've been assigned as a volunteer with Smart (Start Making a Reader Today).  Thursday was my first day and I'm assigned two kinders to read with for the rest of the school year.  All the volunteers went through orientation the previous week but even so the first day was chaotic.  Once a month all the students receive a free book to keep and the October book happened to be that same day - excitement!  The program is 25-years old and has proven to improve reading skills by the third grade.  It's a combination of reading, talking about the book and developing critical thinking skills.  One of my students was an excellent listener and the other has a ways to go. DIL Missy suggested it to me and I love it already.

This is how we vote in Oregon.  Ian filled his out and took it to the mailbox right after breakfast yesterday morning.  I did mine just before lunch and set it on the counter.  Ian headed off the mailbox with mine and I said, hold on a minute Buster Brown.  I'm going to cast my own ballot, thank you very much.  It's nice not to have to go to a polling place but I still want the experience of casting my *own* vote.

And I'm finally knitting again with enthusiasm.  I bought a cone of Bartlett Yarn last spring but never found the perfect pattern.  I spent some time on Ravelry earlier this week using really tight parameters and finally found exactly the cardigan I'd like to wear.  It's not the knitting that's a problem, it's finding something that I will actually wear and enjoy.  The pattern had a link to Interweave and a magazine called Love of Knitting which I bought for $6.99 and downloaded.  I've never heard of this magazine but it had several patterns that caught my eye that might translate into later projects.  It feels good to knit - I've missed it.