Still warm!

It has been a quiet weekend in Iowa. The weather has been unbelievably nice. Last night, after watching John McCain on Saturday Night Live (I thought it was really funny), I went outside with the dogs. I was enjoying the quiet and dark night when I realized I was outside wearing shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops... after midnight... In November! Right now, we are waiting for a batch of ribs to come off the grill. They should be pretty good. We have some amazing sauce from Kansas City to put on them. Yesterday, Sarah and Asher went to feed ducks and play in the park, while I went fishing. I went to the North Racoon River, to a place I hadn't visited since the floods. It looked the same, and I climbed down the rocky bank to fish. After a few minutes, I realized that what looked like a rocky bank was a mass of silty mud with a few rocks studded on top like fruit on the jello at a Utah potluck. Every move I made either put me knee deep in mud, or on top of a rock that quickly sunk in as well. This would have been forgivable if the fish were biting, but they weren't. After an hour at the river, I headed out to Badger Creek Lake, which is nearby, in Madison County. I spent a wonderful afternoon there, fishing (but not catching), enjoying the sun, the remaining fall colors, and the sights of the corn harvest. There were lots of pheasant hunters in the fields and woods across the lake, and the blasts of the shotguns were constant all afternoon (kind of like at our house, which has a shotgun range across the field behind the back yard). This morning we had an extra hour before church (thanks to DST), and decided we would go to the Iowa Machine Shed for what we thought would be Asher's last free Sunday buffet (turns out it's free for 3 and under.) Asher will be three next Sunday, so he had to say goodbye to his class at church this morning. We spent the afternoon grilling ribs and cleaning out the gardens. The hard frost last week (seems like a distant memory) killed all of the plants in our vegetable bed, and the huge flowering plants under our front window. Today, we pulled all the dead plants out and I ran over them with the lawnmower. I put all that stuff in the composter, and piled all the old half-composted stuff from the composter on the empty beds. I am no gardening expert, and did a horrible job with compost this year. I think I've learned a few things about mixing the right materials, though, and may do better with the next batch. Um, yes, there are websites that can help with your composting skills. We'll see. By the way, gas is down to 1.88 here now!