My fingers are still all kinds of yellow-green lovely, but that is because I shucked the third bag of pomegranates last night, thereby not giving the stain from Friday night a chance to wear away. I am hopeful, however, that a bit of energetic scrubbing later on today will get rid of the worst of the stains, and glad that the next phase of this project – boiling the seeds down to juice – will at least not turn me any other funny colors.

I did, as hoped, manage to pass the fourth sack along to someone else to shuck this evening. This gave me the perfect excuse to go over to her house and gush over her kittens. They are long and lanky little things, with huge tufted ears and out-of-proportion bodies. Some kittens need to grow into their paws; these need to grow into the length of their legs. They were perfectly friendly and cuddly, except when there was food involved, and then it was every kitten for himself (and woe be unto any human skin in the way).

Today has been a fairly quiet and low-key day, compared to this past weekend. There was the tea on Saturday, and then Sunday was the usual combination of choir practice and church service. We hosted the coffee hour, so there was extra time spent washing dishes and wiping down tables afterward; then we rushed home to change into more appropriate clothes, inhale some kind of lunch, and went right back to the church to meet some of the others in the 20’s and 30’s group for our monthly outing.

It being October, we decided we needed to go to a pumpkin patch. Richard and I went to this place last year – the one with the corn maze – and had so much fun we really wanted to do it again. So we all piled into our cars and headed off to Davis. There was a brief detour along the way because there was a fire and the roads were blocked, but we eventually made it there (along with lots of other people) and had fun.

The website has an aerial view of the maze, so you can see just how huge it is. We all wandered around looking at pumpkins and gourds and various and sundry squash for a little bit, but eventually we decided to head into the maze. They gave us maps, but we were all determined to try it without guidance, at least to start. Of course, that only lasted the first fifteen minutes or so, until we got lost in a fairly long and windy dead end, and eventually met up with a few more of our group and decided to heck with free wandering; we were going to stick to the map so we could at least find our way to the various vantage points and then find the way out.

It’s a strange feeling wandering around in a maze like this. The corn is so high that you cannot see over the stalks, so you lose all sense of direction or distance. We made our way over to the bridge in the middle of the maze, which takes you high enough to look out over the entire thing. And then we meandered up and down paths to another vantage point on the far side, where we could see where we’d come from and were amazed by how far we’d walked. Then finally we wove our way through the maze to the exit. By this time I was holding the map firmly in front of me, one finger tracing the route as we walked, pretty much ignoring everything else but that little piece of paper, and the others just trailed right along behind me. Even with the map I think it took us a good 45 minutes to make it all the way through.