Week Bye Week

We’ve been talking a lot about the word “penultimate” lately. There will be a lot of “lasts” in the next two years, but we are now in the season of “second to lasts.” Most immediately, we are anticipating our penultimate fall season in this house and all of the things that usually entails.

Fall is ok…

There are a lot of people who live for fall. Pumpkin spice everything, Halloween, and sweater weather. We are not those people. After all, we plan to chase summer year-round, so it stands to reason that fall is not a season that we get excited about.

We do like lower utility bills, though…

But there are some things that we do every year around this time. This being our penultimate fall, some of those things stay the same and some of them are changing.

Every year around this time we do the dance of opening the windows during the cool days and closing them when the higher temps come back. Missouri weather in September is a bit temperamental, with 60s one day and 90 degrees the next.

Back in April we replaced the windows in the main living area and were looking forward to lower utility bills all summer, but our new windows were timed almost perfectly with Evergy’s new rate plan, so there went that. So we are enjoying the lower utility bills that come with turning off the a/c for a few weeks.

Goldfish and gardens

There are a few things that we are not going to be doing this fall. First, we will not be moving the goldfish into the garage for the winter. In the past we moved them into the garage in a 100-gallon plastic tub surrounded by heaters. When we talked through it over coffee a few weeks ago, we determined it was a lot of effort (and electricity) for 5 three-dollar goldfish and a handful of 59 cent feeder fish. We’re not saving $100 koi here.

We found a pond at a school (where our friend teaches) and plan to release them into the “wild” in a week or so. We’re not super confident that these little guys will live a long happy life there (although they might). But as goldfish and feeder fish go, they’ve had a pretty decent life.

We also aren’t going to prep the greenhouse for seed starting, which would typically begin in December. As we mentioned in an earlier blog post, we decided not to start vegetables for next year from seed. But a few days ago, we discussed not putting in a garden at all next year. The upcoming spring and summer will be packed full of a lot of activities, renovations, and vacations, so we’re going to take one thing off our plate and buy tomatoes and cucumbers from the store.

So we had our final garden this summer without realizing it at the time. That was probably for the best. We didn’t get a chance to get sappy about the last cucumber. We are still harvesting tomatoes (in September!), so Stephanie reserves the right to get a little sappy about the last tomato.

Doing fall our own way

Even though we aren’t “Hello Fall!” kind of people, this penultimate fall we plan to enjoy the change of seasons in our own way. We will be taking walks as the leaves change, watching football, roasting marshmallows over a fire, and tackling some indoor projects once the weather turns too cold to be outside. Sooner than we think, we will be bouncing around a region that enjoys 85-degree weather all year long. We may hate cold weather, but one day we might just miss this (well, Stephanie might).