Day of equal night

Today is the autumnal equinox* - the halfway point between the summer and winter solstices. Night and day are of exactly equal length, and the sun set due west this evening. We won't be seeing this much daylight again until 20 March 2012... sorry. In fact, it's all downhill from here until 22 December.

I think the only sensible course of action is to throw yourself enthusiastically into the process of snuggling down for the winter. You might do a bit of knitting (with real wool), make sure all your quilts and blankets and jumpers and thermals are clean and ready for action, fix your draughty windows, and enjoy some warming seasonal foods. All of that, and get outside whenever the sun shows itself - or even if it doesn't.

*: Assuming the Blogger stats are not a total fabrication (and this week the stats say that at least two readers have come to my blog via a baseball cap shop in Indianapolis, so they might well be), some of you are probably in the southern hemisphere. Hello, Brazilians, Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans! Of course it's your spring (or vernal) equinox today. Have a lovely summer and come back to read this miserable message in six months' time!

start small

I've been trying to cook up The Perfect First Post for a month or two (Florence has been waiting!) so of course it's eluded me.  One of the things that persuaded me to start a blog was John Gielgud's character, Cornelius Cardew (presumably named after the radical composer, otherwise that's quite some coincidence), in the very good film The Shooting Party.  I thought, "I could write a diatribe or two," and decided that blogs are the new pamphlets.

Well, maybe a diatribe will emerge naturally later on.  But for now, none is forthcoming; so, like the nummulite himself, I'm starting small.  Here are a few things that are going on at the moment:

I've just moved into a new home and am highly displeased [OK, perhaps I could have made a diatribe out of this] to find that the council won't collect my kitchen waste for composting, because I live in a block of flats, not a house.  The first week, I collected the kitchen waste as usual and then put the bag inside a black bin liner and into my rucksack, to take it to my parents' house since the council collects theirs.  But... even through the evil plastic bag it smelled so bad that I ended up going to the lift via the garbage chute.  I'm trying to think of a solution, preferably one that doesn't involve me and my boyfriend sharing our flat with worms - please email with suggestions!

I'm making a patchwork quilt out of old t-shirts, with a filling of old woollen blankets.  I got slightly carried away in the initial stages so it's 2mx2m.  Probably a bit big for a first quilt.  Anyway...  I'm at the quilting stage now.  Encouraged by some helpful guidance from Victoria, who makes beautiful quilts, I'm quilting by hand - and I've done nearly six sixteenths (who's counting?!).  This'll be blogged about at greater length, I promise.

Spring...  I've moved from a relative park-desert to a much greener area, and it's definitely good.  When the window's open at night I can smell trees, which is surely how it should be.

That's it!  Thanks for reading this far, and sorry about the layout.  Hopefully I'll fathom the intricacies of Blogger before too long...