Living Deliberately

Here is what I have been doing:

Hanging out in Tennessee:

My dad's annual company picnic is in Pigeon Forge every year, and so my family rents a cabin and heads up there for the weekend.  This was our first year with three generations since my nephew came as well.  The picnic (at Dollywood, yee-haw!) was rained out (we have rain checks to go back later this year) but we still had a good time.  Actually my favorite part was sitting on the porch at night watching the lightning that came with the rain.  Jordan and I drove separately because we had an adventure to attend to on the way back and didn't want to force everyone else along.  We went to Tuckaleechee Caverns in Townsend, TN.  They were amazing.  Caverns are fascinating - the formations, the way your eyes play tricks on you, the way perspective gets skewed.  This one had a river flowing through and a double waterfall.  The "Big Room" has proportions bigger than any room in Mammoth Cave, KY.  We drove back through the Smokey Mountain National Park (stopping to hike to a waterfall, we couldn't help it, we are waterfall addicts), and drove through Cherokee, which never fails to both enrage me and give me hope (yay, they have the Cherokee language on all their street signs, boo, they have tipis and "real live Indians" that you can have your picture made with - oh, the exploitation). 

Knitting:

This is the vest I am making.  It has been put on hold for a while, since the other project needs to be done by December, but I am enthusiastic about it.  I am calling it the Villette Vest, since it has kind of a Victorian corset vibe, and also because the color reminds me of Lucy's gown of "purple-gray - the color...of dun mist, lying on a moor in bloom."

I am making a shawl/scarf/wrap at the request of my choir director, who wants to give it to her friend as a Christmas present.  The pattern is ridiculously easy - it's just a huge rectangle of garter stitch, but I am painfully slow at knitting, so it is taking much longer than I would like.  I like the color and material.  It is cotton but has a nice shiney glow to it.

Apple Picking: Jordan and I were back in the mountains for his grandmother's wedding (which deserves as whole post (if not an entire book) all to itself), and we went apple picking on the Blue Ridge Parkway as well.  There is an old apple orchard at Altapass where you can pick the apples off the trees yourself.  They were also having a special blue-grass concert and people were there clogging and two-stepping.  So much fun.  And I didn't have my camera.  Aggh.

We picked a whole peck of apples.  Mostly Jonagold and Winesap-Staymans, but also Golden Delicious and Virginia Beauties and Sweet Saylors and King Lucious.  I will be eating and cooking apples for weeks to deal with all these, but that's OK.  Apple pies, apple dumplings, apple crisp...

Picnicing on the Parkway: 
Every September my extended family goes to Linville to picnic and celebrate the September and October birthdays.  We arrive early in the morning when it is still chilly and make breakfast with eggs and bacon and coffee, muffins and turnovers.  We hang out all day, some of us hiking, some sitting around talking, reading, etc.  Then we have lunch.  This time we had burgers, hotdogs, barbeque, pimento cheese sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches, mmmm.  A few of us hiked to Linville falls, including the nephew - his first ever hiking trip.  He's three months now.  I can't believe my parents took me hiking for the first time when I was six days old.  I don't think I had any choice about whether I would like the outdoors or not!

If you have never been to Linville Falls, definitely make the trip.  I've been approximately a hundred times in my life, but they never get old.

I love fall.