Week 46 (13–19 November 2023)

Fall v2

About a month ago I wrote that trees were yellowing reddening and that it was fall now. Sure it was: it's technically been fall since September 23rd at 6:50am. But it's considerably more yellow and red now than it was in October, and it's most yellow on the ground where leaves have fallen. There are so many leaves everywhere that we're spending hours removing them from places where we'd like them not to decompose please (in the calade, on the terrace). That is fall.

It's colder, we're now back to lighting the stove every evening and sometimes in the morning, if it's overcast. If the sun is shining we sit outside in our fleeces and jackets and take it in as much as we can. Sun sets shortly after 5pm and it's dark by 6pm. C caught a small cold.

We're spending more time at home, a quiet week after the Berlin–Brussels trip last week. It dawned on us that the big trip is coming up in under a month so we started to seriously plan things that we'd procrastinated until now (boring things like figuring out travel insurance but also exciting things like preparing projects that we want to do during the trip).

Some things that made us get out of our slippers: picking saffron (when we just got back from the trip we picked over 100 flowers per day, at the end of the week we were down to a couple dozens. We just pick, F is the one who painstakingly plucks the saffron threads from each flower and dries them), keeping an eye on the ripening of the olives (harvest is coming, mostly for making oil but I also want to preserve a few Greek-style black olives), a bit of climbing (went bouldering in Casteljau with B and E, discovered a new sector "Les dessous de table", ugh the 5s are hard, but the view from the top of the boulders!!).

Watching

Series only, we have some catching up to do. C and I saw the second season of Loki and I also started watching Beef.

Reading