Fall has fallen

Check out this week's forecast:

What a great week it should be for outdoor activities, starting with putting the garden to bed, which is supposed to happen this morning.

There are three pepper plants left, and the peppers are immature, so I think I'll have to sacrifice them to the deer. Something – I'm not sure what – chomped into one (not the biggest, which I immediately plucked from the plant and am hoping will eventually turn red), and perhaps that same something stripped all the leaves from one of the plants. I guess my little twine fence was doing some good after all. (I took it down last week.)

Last week was pretty busy. My Mac G5 has been cranky and slow, so I've been spending the time I would have been surfing the internet (heh) on purging stuff from my hard drive. So far I have recovered more than 10GB of space. Ran a couple system utilities until I was able to connect to the internet smoothly, then downloaded and ran a few more.

One of my biggest issues has been the inability to send an attachment with an e-mail message. While it still takes a long time (a 40MB message took seven minutes to send yesterday), at least I can now accomplish that task. Most of the time.

And speaking of sending, I took the bold move of deleting the entire "Sent" folder in my mail application. More than 3000 messages (including one called "If Spiderman were gay," which was hilarious in 2003) gone! Whoosh!

I walked a total of 36.6 miles last week, burned more than 3600 calories, ate moderate amounts of healthful, home-cooked food and gained 1.5 pounds. Oh, well. I would feel so much better running if I weighed less, and I'd probably weigh less if I could start running again. It's a problem I've been trying to solve for a couple of years now. I guess one of my virtues is patience, although it's beginning to wear thin. Heh.

I'm nearly done knitting the third of four pumpkin trick-or-treat bags. One is for my younger granddaughter and the other three are for the triplet grandsons. I have a short list of projects that should take me through fall: a Doddy, three Christmas stockings and a Big Bad Baby Blanket. Maybe then I can finish my periwinkle blue cardigan.

Did you imagine you'd get away from here without a bit of politics? I don't think so. The health care debate goes on and on and on, when the simplest solution is still HR676. There's too much money in politics, and that's the truth.

And speaking of money, my husband and I went to see Capitalism: A Love Story yesterday. This may be Michael Moore's best film yet. The trouble is he's preaching to the choir. The theatre was packed, and no one was disagreeing with anything they saw or heard. And the applause at the end was spontaneous and robust. Moore might change the minds and hearts of some right-wing conservatives if they would only listen to what he has to say.

Maybe when it goes to DVD, he should package it in a Chuck Norris box.