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Autumn blew in today, blustering great whirls and swoops of redgold leaves every which way.

Time to harvest the ‘maters:

…and make salsa:

Holy Jalapenos, Batman! Yum.

Gandalf blow a ship through one of these.

October 4th is the last day you can register to vote in Washington State. Past elections have shown us that every vote counts. The person we register today could be the vote that makes the difference for Barack Obama, Chris Gregoire, or any of our candidates.

But that’s only part of the story. Did you know that even if you are registered, your voter registration may be marked as Inactive?

1.
Click here to register to vote or change your address. You may need to reregister if you’ve moved or changed your name. Encourage your unregistered friends to visit this site.
2.
Click here to make sure your voting status is set to Active.
3.
When you do get your ballot, send it in as soon as you can. In the primary, a surprising number of ballots were unintentionally postmarked after the deadline.

For more information or if you have any other questions, visit the Voter Information page.

Taught my first clay class today at Magnusson community center today.

I brought my basket of hand-carved rattles and proceeded to show the kids how to make them, at least those of the children who weren’t already digging in to their own projects the instant I opened the bags!

I’d been warned about these homeschoolers(and their very involved parents) and how independent they are and indeed, one of the moms came on pretty strong, marching into the classroom with her kid peeking out behind her and delivering her ‘OK, Ms New Teacher, this is my kid and he’s going to do whatever he wants’ proclamation, but really, it was no big thang, once they figured out I was there to help them play with clay, not teach the fun out of everything, all of us dug right in and proceeded to make rattles, or dragons or cats or wierd insectoid probosci.

Clay, kids, fun and I get paid?

Sounds good to me!

Added even more sand bunny(not to mention Led Zeppelin) goodness to my PNE sand sculpture set on flickr.

Many kisses to Delayne for the photos.

A sweet beach afternoon with Sam and Rowan..

Led to the creation of a bizarre articulated sand worm that Rowan says looks like a Pokemon-eeep!

Then the tide came whizzing in and we had to abandon the worm to the inexorable fate of all sand creations as we retreated to a more expansive part of the beach. Soon, the lovely miss Rita joined us and I made her a troll foot and built a small crowd of little rock people watching the multitude of parasailors leaping in and out of the water, with varying degrees of skill.

By and by, to my delight, Delayne made it into town(after much harrassment at customs-forgetting his passport didn’t help, but they never can resist f—ing with his irrepressible inner coyote) and restored the kidz swiftly drooping spirits with delicious sparkly beverages.

A brilliant launching point for a scrumptious week.

Pics in the usual location.

Sam’s dancing people–created from one square of paper, no cuts, no tape, at the farm.

A few months ago I found a book of wierd, amazing and ridiculous origami and Sam has been working on them as his skilz increase. He also made the dragon and interlocking rings and the invisible duck-although he didn’t have any invisible paper, so the duck, unfortunately, can be seen and looks more like a wobbly baby dragon.

Sam and I had a lovely weekend staying at a little farm on Whidbey Island.

We met Velvet,

a very sweet jenny(female donkey), a bunch of buttheaded goats, chickens, ducks, an overwhelmingly enthusiastic young german shepherd named Savannah and a sweet kitty whose loft-leaping prowess has been sharpened to ninja-worthy extremes by Savannah’s ebullience.

Many thanks to Ginger, Delayney and Caden for sharing their beautiful place with us. It’s a gorgeous cabin and the loft was very cozy and happily for Sam, the dog could not climb ladders. Sam and Caden had a ton of fun bouncing madly on the giant trampoline out back.

Whidbey is beautiful too. We browsed the Langley galleries with their gorgeous bronze animals, awesome carved wood thrones and glass menageries and spent long, luscious afternoons on the beaches.

I made a sand dreamer

and Sam and I created a fort with three entrances and three bridges to reach the tunnels in the outer walls..

Beware the catapults of doom!

‘Twere a loverly weekend, capped off with a waffle(to the joy of my waffle-crazy boy) brunch in Langley on our way home.

Not so lovely to come home to clouds of flies hiding out in my eyrie and corpses all over the kitchen! Apparently Sophie waged war against the midges while we were gone and the ones that didn’t get bombed to death all flew upstairs. Gack.

More pics here. Of the trip, not the fly massacre.

Delayne sent me some of the pictures he took at the PNE. I added them to the flickr set.

He also posted some on his deviant art site. Which you really ought to check out-it’s free to register and there’s tons of great art on there.. But, for those of you whose head will asplode at the merest whisper of a thought of filling out yet another profile, I’ll have mercy and pilfer my two favorites to show you.

Behold, my bunny of awesomeness:

(click to enlarge)

and sculptin’s amazing tunnel of doom.

(click to enlarge)

Is that not the prettiest sand forest you’ve ever seen?

My friend Azra asked a rockin’ question on her lovely blog Dreaming of Chiaroscuro.

If you prayed for God, instead of to God, what would you pray for?

Go see my answer and add your own two cents.

Don’t miss her nefarious tomatoes, while you’re at it.