The rain and fog of autumn have arrived and seem determined to stay. I'm grateful for the soaking watering that the garden needed, but I could do without the tornadoes in the area. So far all we've had is a large broken branch down and lots of soggy leaves on the lawn. At least the hurricane season is dying down at last.

Daylight Saving Time is ending none too soon for me. The growing night time hours are squeezing the day relentlessly shorter. Dawn comes dragging along in its foggy haze, making sleepy starts even more annoying. It seems so unreasonable to get up before the sun does, but human activities are governed by manufactured clocks and schedules. I know, farmers rise early with the cows, but the cows get to go back to bed once their part in the early morning folly is over.

It does make sense to get an early start during the hottest part of the year, taking advantage of the cooler hours as much as the mosquitoes will permit. The weather is much cooler now, another factor that makes a warm bed stick firmly to one's back. We've needed some heat on a few chilly nights, though we still use some air conditioning on warm, damp afternoons. Both inside and outside weather conditions are in flux this time of year.

Returning the clock to a more natural setting will pull my schedule closer to the dawn and a hope for sunlight to spark a little enthusiasm for the day. I've never been a happy early riser, much preferring a gradual start of my day building to a peak later on. The furry alarm clocks do get me up with their wails and toe biting to get their can of cat tuna and an early exit to the garden, but they are pressing their luck when dawn comes three hours after they wake up.

The yellow tomatoes have quit for now but the red tomatoes are steadily producing enough tomatoes for salads. It is mostly Better Boy slicers with a few pear-shaped Romas and the occasional pink tomato. I'm picking a few ripe peppers and handfuls of snow peas to top the salads with their sweetly crisp pods. The peppers are drooping and appear ready to give up for the season.

The broccoli, cabbages, and turnip greens should join the peas soon as the mainstays of the fall garden. They could use another application of Dipel against the cabbage worms, but the rain would just wash it off. They're doing very well so far, particularly the cabbages in last year's tomato patch. That soil has had the most compost and mulch, and the plants are definitely showing the benefits of it.

Leaf raking is proceeding in earnest. The trees and shrubs are showering the ground with their mineral rich bounty, ungratefully raked up and set out with the trash by most city residents. It is about time to start using the mower to mulch leaves and old paper mulch on the beds. The grass has slowed its growth to a crawl, its summer enthusiasm for growing into a meadow waning with the day length. It won't need mowing much longer.

That leaves more time to follow the presidential campaigns, now entering the final week with scandals and follies and back stabbing aplenty this year. I can't recall a nastier campaign season, or one where there is such a clear difference between the two candidates. When the wives and children are practically in a political mud wrestling match along with their spouses and the leading political advisors, it almost makes me despair for freedom and democracy.

The media has jumped into the mud pit as well instead of reporting the scene from an objective perspective. Any questions about a liberal bias are now quite resolved for many of the popular media outlets, losing viewers to the more conservative news sources. Many of the old guard anchors are retiring in the near future, leaving the survival or collapse of their former news programs to fall on their replacements.

I can only hope that the success of the conservative news sources will pull the mainstream media back to a more objective presentation of the news. I'm not holding my breath waiting for it, though. It has been so long since I've watched the national news on the liberal outlets that it surprised me how old the anchors have gotten. I used to watch those programs regularly not too many years ago, but I just don't trust them to be accurate and complete in their presentations anymore. The recent Dan Rather scandal saddened but didn't surprise me.

At least getting the news on the radio leaves me free to do other things while it plays in the background. I've finished another child's sweater and started another one. That will about be enough to send off another sweater box. The other crafts are still waiting while I knit and work on the last gardening for the season.

The organizer schedule is down to a more reasonable length since the planting dates have been rolled forward to the next year. That should make more time for the latest kitchen gadget, a blender/food processor. Mom decided that the way to get more fruit in our diets was to have me make smoothies out of it. It should make more peels for the compost tumblers as well. I'm not sure what I'll have to do when the weather cools down to the point that the tumblers go into their brief winter snooze. I may be sneaking those peels into the blender to grind them up into liquid fertilizer to pour under the paper mulch in the garden. If the smoothies turn out to be a success, stand by for the fattest overfed earthworms in the country.