My cut finger is a lot better

It amazes me that a week has passed and it's still not totally closed up. Today is the first day it hasn't been actively hurting. I definitely should have gotten a stitch or two put in it, but it just seemed like such an inconvenience. Live and learn!

I did a lot of work on the yard today - front and back. (I wore gloves AND a band-aid.) I pulled up all the marigolds, which died in the frost we had a few nights ago, and ditto for the pepper plants. Once I was out there working I decided to rake the yard, which was a bigger undertaking than I expected. It's a lot of work. We have all this ivy in the front yard which captures dead leaves and makes it hard to rake them out. I got a lot of it cleaned up. My family is coming on Thanksgiving so I wanted to try to make things look as nice as possible. The ivy in front still looks like crap, it's kind of a balding pate with a combover and lots of weeds in the bald spots. Ugh. At least I did pull up the current crop of thistles. I hate those, and they have deep and persistent roots so they are just going to grow again until we put some weed killer on them. But they're gone at the moment. We filled up five bags of cuttings. I say "we" because Adam helped with the last bag, but I did most of it myself.

He did however finish my abandoned job of putting together the exercise bike that I just got. It arrived missing a part so I only did the first two steps of the total of eight (the instructions were VERY organized - yay Schwinn) that it took to put it together. The missing part arrived this past week. So while I was outside doing yard work, Adam finished assembling it for me. It has two water bottle holders, a rack on the seat back for your reading material, and even a small fan you can point at your face while you pedal. And it wasn't terribly expensive. I would like to bring a TV down to the basement so I can watch that while I work out, but it's good that I can also read magazines. I do subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, after all, which kind of seems like the perfect exercise literature.

Last but not least, I got what finally does get to be called the last skein of Chokecherry Kokopelli and finished Williamsro. I still have to weave in the ends. I'll post a pic when that's done. It's a nice sweater, and (thank heaven) big enough.