Sunday evening

It's so nice to have people reading my ramblings and thinking, "Oh, me too!" It is nice, isn't it? Or does it indicate that I never have an original thought? That idea bothers me far less than it would have when I was younger. Especially now that I've reached nearly the middle of Sarum. Believe me: Excepting the occasional interpersonal kindness there is nothing any one of us can do that will amount to a hill of beans a hundred years from now. The things that take up so much of our thought . . . wars, standing stones, wildly successful careers or the lack thereof . . . well, perhaps not standing stones, since I hardly ever think about them . . .  in a hundred years nobody will even know what any of it was about.


It's been an incredibly mild and warm weekend, and I've spent a good deal of time outdoors. 
This afternoon I went around and picked up every one of the solar lights that I put out at the beginning of the Warm Time. About a quarter of the things have stopped working. Maybe the solar batteries have worn out or maybe there isn't enough sun these days to charge them. I put all but two of them into the cardboard box in which they arrived, and put the box in the barn. It was dark enough inside the box that almost all of them began to glow. I closed the flaps so that the light wouldn't escape enough to creep me out should I go out there after dark. The two that I did not put away are on either side of the front door. I like the way they look, and now that it's dark by 5:00pm they'll give me a clue where the house is when I get home from work.


In response to comments:

• School taxes are just another kind of property tax . . . a percentage of the value (as judged by the town assessor and his board) of one's home. School tax bills are sent out by the school district or by the school district's agent (a bank) and the funds  are for use by the school district, as distinct from regular old property taxes which pay for everything else.
• Those pictures are House-And-Barn. One property, two buildings. Three if you count the little garden shed . . . the red thing in the pictures with the poodles.
• We have the boyz trimmed in the very most practical and comfortable cuts we can get. Angus gets close-cropped because he's chubby and has silky hair that grows into mats; Max's body grows weekly thinner and he needs extra wool to help keep him from being shivery. So they both look round and roly-poly, but only one of them is. I had to trim Max's bangs yesterday because they were getting so long that they were irritating his eyes. Now he looks like an opossum. It isn't his best look, but he's more comfortable.
• Where neighbors are close enough to wander across a property line, there would be fences. Here where we hardly see a neighbor from one month to the next, and then only as we wave happily . . . they enjoying their morning walk while my vehicle careens down the hill past them on my way to work . . . we leave it to big fields to provide insulation.

It's Sunday evening.
Eight workdays until the Thanksgiving holiday.
Let the countdown begin.