Day 261 of 365

It's all her fault. I take no responsibility for this one.

Today I've been cutting up our pumpkins we grew in the garden to get ready for pumpkin pie. I baked one and I cooked the other in the microwave to experiment with which method I wanted to use for the rest of them. The pumpkin smelled delicious cooking, the house was warm, and I was wearing my sweats.

I usually have the TV on when I'm working in the kitchen, but Idaho executed someone this morning and that's all they were talking about so I skipped the TV noise. That's where the radio came in.

Now there's this gal I work next door to. She's the one that I went to lunch with and the movies with during the summer (and the one whose birthday I forgot). Well, she's been listening to Christmas music this week and singing Christmas songs around me. Three days in a row I've heard it. And so I just had to give her a bad time about it being too early for Christmas songs, about how I don't want to hear them. Those kinds of things.

But today when I was baking up those pumpkins and wasn't wanting to listen to the television, I turned on the radio. To the station she told me about. The one playing Christmas songs already. Yep, I caved in.

So it's her fault that I'm listening to Christmas songs. Yet it doesn't end there.

It's also her fault because of what happened when I was listening to Christmas songs. Not too long after the Let it Snow song finished as I was washing up some pumpkins seeds at the sink, I look up to see this out my kitchen window.

Day 260 of 365

We live near a sugar beet dump.

Lots of farmers around the state of Idaho grow sugar beets. (Sugar beets are a root vegetable that look a bit like a turnip but are closer to the size of a bowling ball.) When they are harvested in the fall they are loaded in farm trucks and sent to sugar beet dumps. Morning 'til night, week after week after week, those trucks arrive and deposit those sugar beets on the ground.

When the beets have been all collected at the dumps and the sugar beet factory is ready to accept them, larger trucks come back during early winter to load them up for their trip to the processing plant where they'll become sugar. Those bigger trucks work days and nights and Thanksgiving and Christmas, with the dump finally being emptied and shut down around New Year's.

We've had a couple solid weeks of beets being hauled in and now it's quiet.

A pile of beets as tall as a two story house and as long as I-don't-know-what are sitting, waiting to be picked up.