I love and adore Fall. It’s cozy and the air smells good, there are pumpkins to pick, hay rides to take (even though my kids might be getting too old), mums to plant even though they wither and die every year, and school is in full-swing. It feels like we’re living an episode of The Peanuts. There isn’t much drama going on at our house, strangely, so I don’t have much to report.

We are getting a few things repaired around the house, like the front door (which was a shambles – talk about horrible feng shui). And we finally replaced our prehistoric hot tub, the one that hasn’t worked since last year when it let out one last gasp while we were in it and it expired. As they hauled it off our property with a crane – dripping and miserable, it looked like a sad, prehistoric muck-pond. I mean, that crap-heap was old. It’s a miracle that none of us were electrocuted while we were sitting in it. I also had them tear down the wobbly, rickety bench that was surrounding it – a few years ago my husband had sat on this very bench as we were having a party, and then – floof! he just disappeared.

One minute he was there, the next he wasn’t.

It was Fiona who figured out that he had leaned back a tad too far and fallen backwards off the deck onto the grass, a drop of about four feet (and highly embarrassing, too). He wasn’t hurt – just embarrassed.

Anyway the new hot tub minus the rickety bench is pretty space age. It’s got all kinds of bells and whistles on it, it even has a lounger in it – and I for one am looking forward to sitting my ass in that hot tub on cold Fall nights, sans fear of getting electrocuted, so I can actually relax.

This morning, something rather hilarious almost happened.

Last night, I had left the Perky-Pet Ready-to-Use Hummingbird Nectar on the kitchen counter because I was going to fill the hummingbird feeder but got sidetracked, as one does, and forgot. So it was sitting on the kitchen counter. Along comes my thirsty husband, who decides to pour himself a glass of what he thinks is cranberry juice.

I must admit to taking a rather long, snarky pause before telling my husband he was about to drink hummingbird nectar. It would have been really hilarious, if he had. But he didn’t. Poor man, if you didn’t know better, you’d think we had booby-trapped the house on him.