We have had a most gorgeous classic autumn look around here the past week or so; the mornings are foggy and gloomy, the afternoons are magnificent, the flowers are hanging in there, and the leaves and trees are more beautiful than we remember them being.

Today was a good day. And this evening is my second ukelele class, and I pity Bob Warren, my patient teacher. He has no idea what a bad student I am.

I took lovely photos, wrote some interesting things, and did a lot of small and good deeds. My Mansion meditation class always lifts me, and there are beautiful things to photograph all around me.

My love for Maria deepens all the time, we are so good for each other.

I even reserved a room in a lovely inn for the day after Christmas; this is something we have done almost every year since we married.

The place we usually stay closed down for the Christmas holiday, but we can go there the day after Christmas, and since we don’t celebrate Christmas, what the hell?

We grabbed a room for one night.

Maria is selling her yarn all over the place; she is busy and happy. You can see it or what’s left of her yarn on her Etsy studio page. She has a bunch of roving too.

We canceled our October vacation along the ocean – too much money to spend now – but I got the inn room for $229 in late December. We are masters of the one-day get-a-way.

It’s getting cold, but my flowers are hanging in, begonias, marigolds, and, any day now, some mums. Everything else is just about gone, but the begonias are delivering in photographic terms.

On warm days, Flo gets up. No matter how tired she gets, she always knows feeding time. We never had to feed Flo; she hunted all night for things to eat and was plump and happy. She is frail and thin now, we provide her twice a day, and she always waits at the right time.

Two months ago, I fell down these steps when I was sick and rushing to the bathroom in the dark. Since then, Zinnia seems determined to watch over me whenever I climb the stairs.

She runs ahead of me, which she never did before, and watches closely until I get up.

I’m heading to Bishop Gibbons on Thursday to write about the creative and highly successful way the school uses the books sent to her via Alaska by the remarkable Alys Curlane of the Bright Lights Book Project in Palmer, Maine.

Tricia white, the head of the English Department, says the kids are lining up to see the new books, and she is working to match them up with the right books.

It’s working way beyond her expectations, she says. She needs more bookcases.

The Imperious Hens are resting more in the shade of the young birch trees; there are fewer and fewer worms and bugs now; perhaps they are taking some time off to relax.

They deserve a break.

The Zinnias have the most dramatic and exciting shapes. I’m getting some bigger ones for next year.

The leaves are a wonderful gift to me and my Leica 2 as we transition from summer to fall to the cold of the upstate New York winter. I’m still figuring out how to photograph them, especially when they bend in the wind. I’m figuring it out.