Happy October!

First - big update: I was able to transfer all of my blog content to Wordpress! Thank you to so many of you who reached out to tell me that you tried and had success. You’re right! It worked! The design is bare-bones and many links will be broken but the photos are there, it’s accessible on desktop and mobile and the search function is excellent. I couldn’t ask for more. (enjoyitblog.com is the link if you want to bookmark.)

Back to the present: as many of you know, I enjoy a quarterly check-in and find that a new season is often a good time to start new projects. I have been quietly setting quarterly goals for all of 2025. I would say I am about 60% successful in accomplishing them so far. (Some wins: making the big wall quilt, wallpapering the fireplace room, launching this newsletter, completing my collected plate wall. Some misses: setting up our upstairs office, finding a kitchen runner, painting something on the girls’ bathroom walls).

Today, I thought it would be fun to return to my roots and publicly share the eight goals I am working towards this fall. (You’ll notice none of my “misses” from the year are still on this list and that’s okay — I will get back to them eventually.)

I have been working on this backyard area for the past six months and I hope November is when I finish. So far, I have covered the weeds in tape-free cardboard (collected from our local recycling center over months), spread wood chips (one bucket at a time) and added rock walls to separate the soft-scaping from the cement pathways. The rocks have been collected from other areas of our property (many were dug out from the ground when the previous owner planted the vineyard and then just left in piles). I would love to finish the rock walls and get some drought tolerant plants planted before the rainy season.

I have pulled most of the dead plants but over the next few months there is a lot to do to prep the garden for next spring. I need to pull the remaining flowers, turn the straw into the soil and plant my bulbs. I hope to grow more anemone and ranunculus this year plus garlic and potatoes. Last fall I spread winter rye seed in the garden beds as a cover crop and I think it really helped so I will be doing that again this season as well.

If all goes as planned, my kiln is being installed in five weeks. That means I should have plenty of time to figure it out, remember how to throw a pot and get some stuff fired and glazed. I cannot explain how excited I am to get back into ceramics again. I made a ton of bowls last time I was in my pottery era. This time I think there will be more intricately painted bowls but also I am thinking about vases! And maybe sculpture?!