1. I feel a new color phase coming on. Soft greys, sunny creams, russets, bright tansy and sunflower yellows, navy and slate and icy blues, bark browns and greys, deep dark chocolates.

2. Rustic, simple shawls in earthy neutrals, like Terhi’s at Mustaa Villaa and Alexandra’s at Moonstitches.

3. Simple socks with just a touch of ornamentation, like Terhi’s here and here.

4. Cooking outside on the grill, even though it isn’t summer anymore. It’s right out the kitchen door under the porch overhang, so it’s just as convenient as the stove. Tonight before choir practice I’ll be tossing some Yellow Finn potatoes in olive oil, fresh rosemary and sea salt; stuffing some Anaheim and Gypsy peppers with mozzarella or Trader Joe’s beluga lentils (already cooked!) seasoned with lemon juice, toasted walnuts and some of the marjoram that’s taken over the herb bed; and dumping the lot on the grill.

5. The Japanese anemones and Joe Pye weed in my garden, which bloom faithfully from July through October.

6. Oregon apples from the farmers’ market. We favor Tsugarus, Akanes, Honeycrisps, Ambrosias, and Jonagolds in mid-October. I find the names of apples enchanting (I weep that I somehow missed the Black Gilliflower (Sheepnose) variety), and despite the luscious bounty of summer peaches and berries, they’re my favorite fruit.

7. Early-season West Wing episodes on DVD. I *heart* my fictional government.

8. David Copperfield. It’s our geekier-than-thou book club selection for December. We dig the classics.

9. My new Keen shoes from the REI sale, the only model that seems to be narrow enough for my feet. I went for the army green with orange stitching. They’re my everyday fall shoes, and I finally feel like a real Portlander now that I’ve got the Official Footwear.

10. Homemade chiya – the Nepali version of chai: Brew up a pot of black tea (I use Red Rose) with sugar to taste, slices of fresh ginger, and cardamom pods. Drink it like that for kaalo chiya (black tea) or add hot whole milk (1 part milk to 3 or 4 parts chiya is generally good, depending on the strength of your chiya) for dudh chiya. I made a big jar of kaalo chiya, removed the tea bags after they’d steeped, and have been keeping it in the refrigerator to reheat a cup whenever I want some (which isn’t quite four or five times a day, as in Nepal, but it’s been nice to have at tea time).

11. SouleMama’s blog, whence cometh the spur for this post. I’d like to be able to order a future family life out of this enticing catalog. Mine would take place on San Juan Island, but the rest – the cute and clever kids, the crafts, the walks in the woods, the little daily discoveries, the mad photography skills to capture it all – would be much the same.

Hope is a word that’s taken on political overtones during this marathon election cycle. This isn’t a political blog; I happen to have strong feelings about politics, but I choose not to print them here. Besides being a banner and a rallying cry in 2008, hope is a plain human sentiment we all need in anxious times like these. My work and affiliations are such that I know non-profits and charitable groups are experiencing the anxiety acutely: people tend to clamp their pocketbooks shut when the economy goes into the flusher. I realize that youth, employment, and native optimism are advantages, even luxuries, that many don’t have. But I do believe that things are going to get better, and that they’ll get better faster for more people if those of us who can afford to keep an even keel and continue to support worthy causes in any way we can do so. Personally, I felt there was a choice: either I could fret about the obliteration of our 401Ks, or I could count our many blessings and take extra pride in making my annual contributions.

That’s one of the reasons I didn’t hesitate to make a donation to Ramona Carmelly’s fundraising walk against breast cancer. I zipped over to her website upon seeing La Harlot’s interpretation of her gorgeous Hibiscus for Hope socks, and in the seconds this hop through cyberspace took, I was already thinking this was a heck of a good model: tantalize knitters, whom we know to be among the most generous folk on the planet, with a tasty new pattern, then ask them to make a donation to your cause in return for it. No amount suggested. But I’ll bet most people gave more than the five bucks you’d expect to plonk down for a sock pattern. And what a sock pattern it is:

These pictures don’t do them justice. My feet are too big to model them, alas. But the pretty yarn is Dream in Color Smooshy in Petal Shower (the perfect un-twee pink), and look at this clever Bordhiesque heel:

Can you see the wee baby gusset under the sole that sets it up? And the way the lace pattern gradually wraps all around the leg? Actually, I veered far off the path with the heel itself. I may have unvented a whole new short row heel by accident. The thing is, I’m a top-down sock knitter. I see the advantages of toe-up, namely the assurance that whenever you run out of yarn you’ll at least have a sock-shaped garment that covers all the essential parts, but I never know where I am with the heel. Ramona directs you to Wendy Johnson’s short row heel instructions, but wouldn’t you know I managed to reach the heel point on both socks when I wasn’t near the internet? I can work a short row in my sleep when it’s for a heel-flap sock or some extra bust shaping, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember how to begin in the toe-up situation. And because I’d rather make things up and be wrong than cease knitting, I conjured a short row heel that involved working outward from a small group of central heel stitches, wrapping the stitches and then knitting them up and wrapping their neighbors on the next pass.

I suspect this isn’t really the greatest way to do a heel. I think I got away with it because of the lace pattern being stretchy; if you had a rigid fabric and a high instep you’d definitely want the deeper, cuppier heel you get from Wendy’s (or anyone else’s) instructions. And actually, I don’t know that I DID get away with it – the recipient is in New York and I haven’t heard whether or not she can put them on her feet comfortably. I need to experiment on a pair for myself. But the socks almost certainly would have been too long in the foot if I’d done the heel the right way: I eliminated about an inch of sole length by inadvertently chopping out that nice little trapezoid you get under the heel in normal conditions, and since the socks were on track to fit me, this was a good thing.

Anyway, they’re sock-shaped socks, and I’m not a Socktoberfest loser, and they’re a little drop for the fire hose in the fight against cancer, and they’re for someone I love who lost her mama to the disease, and I even survived some dramatic moments when I dropped the package in the mail last Saturday AFTER HOURS and then realized I’d forgotten to print a return address on it. (I made a panicky dash home for a bright yellow sheet of paper on which to scrawl a desperate plea for clemency from the postal workers. The post-anthrax rules say they must callously discard packages without return addresses, and I was in something of a lather to think my handknits might meet their end in the rubbish. So I mashed my sad little note with my return address through the slot after my package and prayed. Then I decided that direct action was probably a safer bet in such a critical case as this, so I went around the back of the building and clung to the chainlink fence and hallooed a woman who looked like she was on her way home. She answered. She pitied me. She went back inside and found my sorry yellow note. She wrote the return address in the proper spot for me. Marika’s Hibiscus for Hope socks were saved.)

And speaking of hope: I don’t often feel driven to hug four-star generals, but my opinion of Colin Powell went way up this weekend when he took the national stage and pointed out that whether Barack Obama is a Christian or a Muslim ought to be irrelevant, and that we should mind the message we’re sending to Muslim-American children who dream of growing up to be president.

This is one of my favorite months. I love the crisp days we get before the rains set in. Today was a no-excuses yardwork day, with beautiful sunshine after a morning that flirted with frost. I raked. I weeded. I clipped. I gathered in the last of the tomatoes for sauce. Mr. G borrowed the neighbors’ mower to puree my rakings, and then I mulched the plant beds. Fresh mulch is, apparently, for dogs to lie in.

I realize Lark has made infrequent appearances on the blog. Look what a leggy teenager she’s grown into:

I also photographed and mailed some new knits, but I’m going to wait until they’ve reached their recipients to show them here. Let’s just say I have a score to tally in the great annual knitting celebration that ends in -toberfest. And more.

I didn’t bring a camera on our backpacking venture two weekends ago. The SLR is too big and clunky; the battery on my little ’02 Canon PowerShot SD110 lasts about a therapist’s hour these days. So I only have the images I captured in my mind: ravens wheeling and cavorting in the high winds over the ridge above our sheltered lake; the abundance of huckleberries and blueberries on the shore all around our camp (delicious with oatmeal); Lark springing through the heather hunting bugs, oblivious to the gray jays’ thievery of her untouched kibble; sunrise over the lake turning the landscape these colors:

(When in want of a camera or drawing supplies, recreate the picture in yarn.)

But I did bring home a souvenir to remind me of the trip:

A sleeve! I didn’t quite make good on my threat to knit while hiking, but I did knit at our campsite as long as my fingers would function in the cold. Because it did get cold: we had perfect, glorious sunshine, but Wapiki Lake is at nearly 5300 feet, and fall was on the way. With no forethought whatsoever, we managed to arrive after the night temperatures had suppressed the mosquitoes, but before they started to dip much below freezing. There were ice crystals in the muddy places in the morning, and we snuggled the dog into Mr. G’s bag before dawn when she got shivery.

But numb digits were worth it to be sitting on a log by the still lake, watching the first light fire the trees and water red-russet-amber and finally brilliant greens, knitting quietly with my luscious Wensleydale and waiting for the band of curious jays to blow through camp in search of comestibles.

My Amanda sleeve is almost finished. The cuff is quite snug and for a while I considered ripping back and casting on more stitches. But somehow I couldn’t stop knitting. This yarn is so honest under my fingers, so springy and strong and lustrous and close to the animal that grew it, that it just kept luring me on. I kept thinking, “I need to make a decision: if I’m going to rip back, I really should stop now and do it.” But I love the fabric growing under my needles and I couldn’t ever quite bring myself to deconstruct it. I think I’ll just block it a little wider and figure that stitches tend to relax over time and washing anyway.