Fall At Last, Fall At Last

Friday morning is the official start of fall, and I'm so ready for it.

After a long and brutally cold winter, we had a VERY brief spring before rushing into a hot, dry summer. It was one of the driest summers on record in New Mexico (and elsewhere, especially Texas), and while we didn't have the 100-plus temperatures that Texas did, we got over 90 more than usual. Actually, it's unusual to reach 90 at all and our highest temperature was only 93.8.

But for the past couple of weeks it's mostly been highs in the 70s and lows in the 40s. Perfect! Occasionally it dipped down into the upper 30s, but we haven't turned on the furnace yet. It's that great time of year when we don't need the swamp cooler or the furnace.

Last weekend our wood guy delivered a load of wood (Ron had called him a few days before; we've been getting wood from him every year for a few years now). He said it was a cord, but it was a very generous cord, more like a cord and a half. It's a mixture of cedar and pinon. The cedar is deep red in color, almost too beautiful to burn. Almost. It puts out a sweet cedar scent as it burns; think of cedar closets. The pinon puts out a scent that reminds me of church incense. I think burning all pinon would be too much, so the combination of cedar and pinon is just right. We burned fires on Saturday and Sunday, just to make sure the wood was OK. It was! Then the weather warmed up enough that we didn't need to have a fire.

Before we got the wood, we had several days in a row of cool, rainy weather and the high temps stayed in the 60s. The house felt a little chilly, so I made oven foods for dinner like Salmon Loaf and Baked Potatoes. And we brought out the extra blanket to put on the bed, a super warm fleecy blanket with the image of a wolf head on it (and smaller wolves on the bottom, so we know which way the blanket goes when we make the bed).