Either I am getting better at it or I overestimated the time it's taken to do windows in the past. It took me three hours to remove the screens, bring up the storms, bring down the screens, wash all the storms and the outside sashes, and hang the storms. This time I had Windex Outdoors, which attaches to the hose and has settings for rinsing and washing, and a squeegee, and I had already washed the outside sashes of the living room windows. However, I had to maneuver the screens and storms around the fairly precarious beer-brewing set-up in the coal cellar. And it's not as if I've been doing weights to ease the job of hoisting three-foot-wide windows (three: bedroom, sunroom, and kitchen) up the stepladder without breaking either them or myself. But yea, that job is done, just in time for Standard Time.
Friday was also the first day of fall, temperature-wise, with a high of 55. That made the inevitable ricochet of water off the windows and onto me not excessively fun on the shaded north side of the house. Today was cooler, in the low 40s, and the plan was to dig out the vegetable garden. Tomatoes are still ripening, and there's not been a hard frost yet.
I did take up the squashes, discovering three more croquet-ball-sized pie pumpkins hiding under the bishop's weed and culling the bizarre larger pumpkin from its vine. I figured it was the Casper variety, since it was pale orange from the start, but it hasn't whitened yet. I'm not going to carve it this year (a first for me) but instead see if I can do something edible with it.
Someone or other rediscovered a Hungarian writer, Sándor Márai, and retranslated his novels. It must have been Susie who recommended Embers to me last month. I just finished it this morning, a quick read because of its compelling narrative and smooth translation, not because of its subject matter. It reminded me, just because of the one plot point, of Howard Owens's Littlejohn. Remarkable, nearly all in one character's narrative speech.
They bought such a house for only a summer house at first? and the state didn't survey the house before selling it? Ah, the idyllic '50s. It felt more like Edward Eager, like The Well-Wishers, than like Elizabeth Enright, not only because of the illustrator.
Jerry Spinelli's been popular and commended over the past ten years, with a Newbery Medal and Honor under his belt, but I don't connect with his protagonists. They have been, in the three I have read, boys, which might be why, but I connect with, say, Ponyboy Curtis, with whom I have less in common than with Crash. I'll read Stargirl soon and see if it's Spinelli or boys.