Remember those leaves I was rhapsodizing about, oh, say, a week ago? The leaves that made the drive home through my valley look like this:

'Member?

Well, after a week of extremely bad weather--rain, wind and even a bit of snow--most of those leaves are down now.

And where have they landed?

WHY IN MY YARD, OF COURSE!

I figure most every leaf that began falling within a three mile radius of my place made it its mission to land, by hook or by crook, in my yard.

A surprising number of them succeeded.

So I spent this wonderfully warm fall afternoon, the afternoon when I should have been sipping a nice Aussie chardonnay by my pond, finishing up Jane Urquhart's "The Underpainter" ... well, I spent this afternoon raking leaves.

Fine.

(I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that what with all the excitement in my life and all, really, this diary SHOULD be called Partygirl, eh. What can I say? Someone else grabbed the name.)

So, anyhow, I'm beavering around with the rake, getting all the leaves into nice big piles to drag off on a tarp into the woods, when I hear a rustling behind me. I look over and see that my spousal unit is busily destroying one of my tidy piles by playing with Zubby in it.

This is the man who is SUPPOSED to be finishing our new roof. Instead he is on his hands and knees burying a cat in leaves. The cat is having a wonderful time, exploding out of the leaves and then running back to be reburied.

It was Zubby who eventually tired of the game. (I'm thinking my husband could have done it all afternoon, but we'll never know for sure, eh).

After being buried one last time, the cat dozed off in the leaves.

So there you go, today's big adventure--I raked leaves and the cat slept in one of the piles.

Really, I should have called this diary Partygirl. I don't know why I didn't.