(Started this month-in-review post multiple times the last week in October and only got to finish in November, backdating so I can find it in future. It's been that kind of month(s).)

October's first nine days were consumed by travel to Kauai (which I have not yet had enough brain to write about) and the following nine blurred by an extended remix of jet-lag and gloomy weather (the primary reason for the previous parenthetical). During the rest of the month I worked on seasonal prep chores: cleaning up the veg garden and storing its infrastructure, switching the porch from screens to glass, changing over to cold-weather house clothes and bedding, etc. There is of course more to do, that garlic isn't going to plant itself.

It hasn't been all malaise and tedious chores: amusements have included cider and donuts, seeing a few late-season pretty trees on the occasional sunny days, and a Rhode trip to Fall River and Newport for a change of sea-nery. Portugalia Marketplace provided tasty lunch and amusing shopping (admired but did not enter the bacalau clean room) in the shadow of a ten-foot rooster; I'm now thinking about visiting the Azores. Hartley's Pork Pies provided equally-tasty French meat and chouriço pies for the freezer (a different style than also-tasty Thwaites Market ). And after my first Ocean Drive ever (I preferred the farms to the mansions), Brenton Point State Park provided the theme-continuing Portuguese Discovery Monument, an appropriately spooky neglected arboretum, and a wind-tossed south-facing Atlantic viewpoint where the next definite landfall would be South America (or maybe Cuba; need to find a good recipe for arroz imperial).

Wrapped up the month with our traditional Samhain observance of "go out for the afternoon / evening since our unlit and sidewalk-free cul-de-sac doesn't get trick-or-treaters". Shunpiked our way through NH to Peng's Pizza Pies for a lemon and onion white pizza with anchovies and watched Biddeford's parade of trick-or-treaters, then made a faster drive homeward via assorted grocery shopping. And now we are provisioned for the darker times ahead.