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I love these crisp, delicious Autumn days and nights… The fog burning off to let the sun caress the glowing scarlet and gold embers of the deciduous trees and the blustering winds tossing the leaves about every which way. The punkins and squashes and soups. The harvest moon and the convocations of crows.

Kim asked me to do a bodypainting performance for the Little Red Studio’s Sensual Repast and Rita agreed to come be my canvas, so I covered her in leaves and crows rejoicing in the copper moon.

More leaves blowing about her back..

Yum. Then we got to feast on Kim’s delicious Repast. Scrumptious punkin soup, phat crab cakes and meltingly luscious lamb legs.. I had to run home after the main course to hang with my kiddo, so I missed the Erotic Haunted House and dessert, but it was a lovely evening, nonetheless.

Mmmm…

Flickr’d set here.

Aside from the stoopid chicken pox episode, it’s been a fabulous few weeks. My dear friend Yoni flew in from Ireland-well, he’s been living in England mostly lately, but did a sweet sojourn in the isle of Guinness-to visit.

Yay! Sure missed ‘im. It was so good to catch up on everything and see his cool pics of Avalon. Ooooooh.

I had to postpone my Knotty Lingerie party due to Sam’s itchypoxybadness, so instead, Ms Rowan came over and we hung out and laptopped and laughed our butts off. Then, sunday, we had a passel of friends over for pumpkin madness!

Yoni made punkin soup, Rita brought punkin cookies, Ben made punkin pie and we all scooped the guts out of a buncha punkins and made loverly lanterns.

Flickr’d pics here.

October’s been a hoppin’ month so far! So much so in fact, that only now am I finally getting around to flickring and blogging about some of my autumnal adventures.

Phweph. Downtime, it’s a good thing.

Anyway, first in line is the Appling trip that Rita, Ben, Sam and I went on to get enough lovely, round globes of tart sweetness to make our own cider-yummmmm!

Lucky for us cider-happy peeps, South 47 Farm in Redmond was having a harvest festival. After wandering through the corn maze, gawking at the wooly cuteness of the alpacas, and coveting the squashes, we filled up our baskets with apples, onions and a bonanza of squash and buzzed on home to clean off the cider press Rita had discovered under her house.

We loaded up the machine while Sam boinged about excitedly on the trampoline and crunch, crunch, MUNCH! it ate up all the apples and yielded a lovely, bubbly, brown cider.

Go see the pics!

Soooooooooooo goooooooood! You could taste the crispness of the apples singing in the rich, thickness of the gorgeous brew.

But that was only the beginning of the apply goodness… Ben proceeded to make an OMG delicious apple pie for after-burrito dessert and I took home a jar of cider that would later evolve into cider brownies and cider cocktails and hot apple cider…………

I love fall.

Autumn blew in today, blustering great whirls and swoops of redgold leaves every which way.

Time to harvest the ‘maters:

…and make salsa:

Holy Jalapenos, Batman! Yum.

My freezer is now full of plump, delicious blueberries.

Rita and I picked ‘em out at Blueberry Blossom farm in Snohomish. Yum.

I also took her nettling for the first time yesterday out in Discovery park, with my other new foraging convert, Rachael.

The secondary growth is not as lush as the spring pick was so we didn’t overpick the colonies, but we all harvested enough to have a few good yummy nettle meals. Rita and I celebrated later that evening, with sauteed nettles and shallots as a side for sweet potato bisque and smoked gouda grilled cheese sandwiches. Mmmmmm…

Berrying pics.

It’s a berriful world out there right now and I’ve been taking full advantage of it.

My friend Seb teaches classes on the wild things out there. What’s edible, what’s medicinal, what’s tasty and what’s bleeeah. Rita, Ben, Kevin and I trailed her across Tiger Mountain last saturday and learned all sorts of secrets and treasures.

We feasted on a multitude of delicious(and a few not so delicious) offerings. Huckleberries, blackberries, thimbleberries, blackcaps, lichen(imagine dry, sweaty paper), licorice fern, cat-tail root(sort of potatoey), wild plum leaves and other strange forest delicacies.

I especially loved the blackcaps-deep maroon/black raspberries-and the thimbleberries, which were surprisingly plentiful and quite tasty.

Kevin discovered a sleeping snake(you can see it on flickr with the rest of the picture parade) and we worked up quite a thirst with all that tromping about in the hot sun, so we hit the Snoqualmie Brew Pub for lunch and pitchers of rootbeer.

The rootbeer is excellent, which is fortunate, since we ended up consuming way more of it than we’d intended as the waiter’d forgotten to put in our order and thus we sat for several hours in sun-dazed conversation until we finally mentioned that we were starving and he, mortified, confessed his error and gave us a free extra pitcher.

All in all though, it were a grand day and we floated out of there on a haze of rootbeer bubbles, with heads full of foraging knowhow.

So, the morning after Rita’s party(see below), we crawled out of bed-er, well, more like out of couch, or floor to the joy of Ben’s delicious pancakes. Happily stuffed, we waddled down to the fair and waded through massive herds of determined fairgoers.. And waded, and waded and…

…finally found a spot to sit at near the very end of the parade route. And waited and waited and waited.. A sporadic mostly naked biker popped by now and then, but by the time the parade came our way, Ben and Dawn had given up and deserted. Sam and Rita and I stuck it out, but the floats were so sparsely spread out by the time they got to us that about two thirds of the way through we thought it was over and our whole tail end of sweaty, slightly irate humanity started heading back down the route only to get shouted at when we met the rest of the parade rounding the bend. Eep!

Oh well. Our patterned butts were glad to get a short respite from the pebbly concrete and we jammed ourselves into an edge of crowd to enjoy the rest of the show.

It wasn’t as spectacular as some years, but I rather liked Ol’ Spaghettihead and the Pirates.

This is my favorite picture though-not because of the cockpole guy and his lovely muscles, but for the three lookyloos with the cameras in the background gawking at the nekkid chicks. Priceless.

More Solstice parade heah.

Laloo’s-it’s goatmilk icecream believe it or not, and it’s far and away the mostest, bestest, chocolatiest icecream I’ve ever reveled in.

Sam gives it a rating of Godly!

Now if only I could find some of their wackier flavors, like chocolate cabernet, black mission fig, lemon chiffon or molasses tipsycake! Oooooooooh, shivers.

Ben and Rita had a ridiculously fun party last night.

The theme was terrible costumes and great homemade pizza. Ben used his amazing sourdough to create the pizza crust and we all brought a multitude of yummy toppings.

Sam and I had a blast dressing up hideously for the event, as you can see. We fit in smashingly with the rest of the fashion atrocities.

When we weren’t sucking Ben(spiffy turquoise slacks and all) into the puppy puddle on the couch, Sam persuaded Rita to spend much of the evening boinging on the giant trampoline behind the house, extravagantly topped pizzas kept popping out of the oven, a crazy cacophonous jam session developed in the music room and we held a nun chucking tower demolition in the living room.

A most excellent party. More pics…

Sam and I made this mandala of stones to celebrate earth day tonight in the beautiful little rock and glass sculpture park that graces our humble ‘burb.

Then we ate lots of yummy desserts.

And threw some tasty bits in the blackberry brambles behind the park, as an offering to Momma Earth. I’m sure the rats and squirrels will be happy to serve as her priestly mouthpieces and accept the sacred morsels of baklava, macaroon and lemon bar.

Thank you, Earth. I love you so, your strong roots and beautiful rocks, your swift streams and luscious waterfalls, for your soft green moss and rich dark soil. For sand and clay and snow to play with, to frolic in, to sculpt. For plants and gardens, fruit trees and wild beasts. My eternal gratitude for sustaining and nourishing us foolish humans, even as we proliferate and perpetrate past all sense or justice or even sanity.

Thank you for being there every time I fall, exhausted, heart-broken, depleted and lost, into your leafy lap and every time I leap, excited and coursing with energy and life, bouncing with joy, dancing and sparkling with creativity, renewal and purpose.

May I serve you as you have me. May these hands, this heart, mind, body and soul nurture, protect, encourage, delight, celebrate and sustain you.

So mote it be.