T Stands for More Autumn Views

    Hi everyone. Happy new week to you. And hello to everyone who visits  Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's blog  for our weekly T Day meet up.

     Last week was another busy week. It was also my 38th wedding anniversary, not that we did much since my husband was busy building some stairs that our home insurance company was requiring.  😩 I  heard back about my MRI results too. I have a small (less than 50%) tear where the muscle and tendon connect at my rotator cuff. Now I need to see what the doctor thinks I should do about it. ⁇

       We also had some rainy days, and one day that felt more like late November than October.

       Here's some beautiful autumn views from my area. I hope they aren't too boring, but I am just loving all the autumn colors right now. ❤ This first photo is the sugar maple in my back yard. I love this tree, and even though I had to move half of my veggie garden because it blocks sun from that area, I don't want to cut it down. 

And here's the sun through the leaves while I was doing some light gardening cleaning the other day.

   Let me add a few more  views on a rainy afternoon when I was driving up to a friends house for a visit.

   I've also had some more wildlife interactions. When I moved a pot after I pulled out the plants, I found this guy underneath it.  He's an Eastern Red Backed salamander. He definitely wanted to hide so he crawled into the rocks and disappeared just moments after I snapped this photo.

    As I was trying to spread some milkweed seeds/open pods off my plants, I found one stem was covered with these milkweed aphids. I read they are not native species and are invasive. 😕

  This one is pretty self explanatory.

    After some almost bird free time at my feeder, the birds are coming back. Here's a bluebird who was watching Pete, and Pete who might have been watching the bird back. Or he might have been just checking out his yard.

   For the last several days I've had a small flock of yellow rumped warblers (Myrtle subspecies) at my feeders. I didn't know they looked more grey-brown come fall.

    These zinnias and  my black eyes Susans have just about had it for 2026.

   But my heirloom perennial chrysanthemums are starting to bloom. They are very late bloomers. These originally came from my grandmother's garden, then to my mom's, and then I took some for my garden.

    It's still too warm to wrap the bee hives for winter, but we had some very cold wind this past weekend. Before that I put a tarp around the sides of the hives that get the wind. It wasn't so much for warmth, but more as a windbreak so the bees didn't have to work so hard to stay warm.

   And speaking of bees, I've been filtering my honey. This was my first batch. I think I'll have just under 3 liters of honey once I finish with the second batch.  That's so much  more than I thought I'd get from one hive. 

    Once I finish with batch 2,  I just need to filter the honey through a fine sieve and then sterilize some jars and fill them. 😏

   And to finish up this post I need a drink photo for T. I bet this will be one of the strangest ones ever for T day, but for lack of any other photos I am going to share it. 

    Two weekends ago we had a family get together for my mother-in-law's celebration of life. It was definitely a DIY service because you are even allowed to dig the grave yourself. (She was cremated so the grave did not need to be very large.)  The theme of the day was to celebrate things my mother-in-law loved, and one thing she did love was farm fresh apple cider. So here we all are, towards the end of the burial,  drinking a toast to my mother-in-law. The 2 cups on the top of the gravestone was because we put one out for her, and one out for my father-in-law who passed in 1990. We know they were there in spirit.

   That's all for me. Have a super T day and week ahead everyone.