Omega

Omega. I realised tonight that's the brand of heater I pull out this time every year. How fitting a ritual for farewelling the summer and facing a harsh winter. Admitedly, not so harsh when you're snuggled inside with a heater, but certainly a bit of a shock for two Sydneysiders facing a Canberra winter for the first time in four years. I love the cold days but I'm not sure I'll ever get used to that life-threatening moment when you step out of the shower on a below-zero morning.

Anyway, I have been most remiss with the Autumn photos - Canberra is looking its best this time of year but sadly I have been too busy galavanting about to get many decent pictures. So these will do:

Corrected

Daddy-fu (formerly PIC) has come through with the correct words for that Michael Leunig poem:

Autumn, it's Autumn!
The sweet and sad post mortem!
The things we did last summer that we'll never do again.
Stranger, and stranger,
The cold and empty manger,
The things we felt last summer that we'll never feel again...

FO's and SO's

Yay! I made my first sale on Etsy (teapotandsnail.etsy.com). On Monday this little crossover top will be making its way to California.

Now I need to get to work and make a few more things to go up, but in the mean time I've been busy helping a friend get some tote bags made for the local school fete. They went up for sale this morning and were mighty popular - I'll post some of the pics soon, when Blogger lets me.

Post-mortem

Autumn, autumn
The sad and cold post mortem
The things we did last summer that we'll never do again

I wish I could remember the rest of this poem by Michael Leunig. It so sums my life up at the moment. I have had a gloriously indulgent 6 months off from work to enjoy the summer, but now that autumn's here and winter is on its way I have remembered that I have to go and get a job, and this little daydream has to end. There's lots of earning to be done so that we can buy a new house and settle ourselves fully into domestic bliss.

Autumn is my favourite time of year. It's the time I first started celebrating the seasons as a pagan, and it's also a time of the year whose themes most apply to my life in general. Autumn is a time to reflect and let go of the past, both good and bad - something I've never found easy to do. But I also love that autumn is a time to hunker down in preparation for the winter and be a bit of a hermit - my true nature. I'm so glad to be back in Canberra for it this year where you really do feel like you get a proper autumn, unlike Sydney where you have a year-long summer with a brief interjection of biting Harbour winds sometime around August.

And very soon it will be Samhain (for the uninitiated that's Halloween, celebrated on May 1 in the Southern Hemisphere) - my favourite celebration. In preparation I have gone out and bought the following goodies:

A flash new rolling pin, a scary cat biscuit-cutter to make scary gingerbread cats, and some black food dye to help ice them with.

As I write, the wind whips the house and whistles through the eaves - I can't wait for the crackling frost of winter!