You have to admit, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse probably take the blue ribbon when it comes to costumes.

And this one is my personal favorite:

And this year she’s going as the Great Pacific Garbage Dump.  Pictures at 11:00.

Trust me, this post will hang together. Eventually.  More or less. My genre is stream of consciousness.

Been watching the Giants and some other team in the World Series in PG & E Park.  Beautiful, but pretty much everyone mourns for Candlestick.

I was remembering what was supposed to be the most exciting Series ever in the Bay Area when it was A’s v. Giants, and, at the exact moment of the first pitch, 3rd game, the earth moved.

Now, by 1989, I had lived in the Bay Area for about thirty years.  We really didn’t even flinch at these things, but with this one, when the TV screen scrambled and the house creaked, I knew.  I went into automatic and crawled under a sturdy table.

And this is where my heritage of hymns also automatically clicked in.  Without even realizing what I was doing, I sang the entire first verse of “Oh, God, our Help in Ages Past.”  Where that came from, I do not know.  Actually I do know.  It came from a lifetime of hymn singing. A shelf in my bookcase bears evidence.

On another occasion, I was having an MRI.  You know.  You’re in that enclosed capsule keeping perfectly still.  You can’t sing, of course, but amazingly and unexpectedly, my soul began silently to sing.  The great body of Psalms I knew from years of singing Morning Prayer.  Venite, Te Deum, Benedictus,  Jubilate.  “O Lord, in thee have I trusted; never let me be confounded.”

All this is miraculously stored away somewhere in my brain.  That’s the same brain that can’t seem to recall where I put my sunglasses.  I think this old brain has its priorities right.

What a heritage!

I spent entirely too much time this week working my way through Edward Rutherford’s 860 page tome New York.

It is fascinating.  It begins with the early Indian and Dutch settlers on Manhattan and goes right into the 21st Century.

By coincidence, last night I was reading the part about the construction of the Erie Canal and woke up this morning to hear on the early news that today is the anniversary of its October 26, 1825 opening.  Now I’ve spent hours looking at maps and pictures online.

I loved reading about how Governor Clinton, who was widely ridiculed for this “folly,” on its completion, carried two buckets of water from Lake Erie and poured them into New York harbor to symbolize that the two were now a contiguous waterway.  I am only sad when I was young and spent a year living near the canal that I did not take the opportunity to explore its entire length.  That’s just the kind of thing I love to do.

Guess we had a little wind last night.

It was a beautiful day on Estacada “Lake” up in Milo McGiver State Park.  

Found a really nice spot to take out for lunch

where we were reminded that big leaf maple leaves are really big:

Maybe the season is over, but I’m not taking the rack off the car just in case. You never know.