At last, my favorite fruit of all summer is ripe (except for blueberries, raspberries, apples ... ), well you get the idea.  But I really do love our purple plums.  The yellow plums have come and gone, we gave most of them away because they ripen so quickly we can't use them all.  But these purple ones are so sweet and tender without becoming too soft.

Daughter went out and picked a huge amount of them yesterday.  We keep most of the fresh picked produce in our carport until I have time to do something with it.  Its cold out there but not frosty.  At least not yet. She also picked pears, a huge box.

Trying to decide what to do with everything.  We will keep a lot of plums to eat fresh but cut the rest in half, remove the seed and dry the halves.  The pears are another story.

I'm not much on canning any more as I've said before.  So, in that case we probably will give most of them away.  She likes pears as does my mother who lives too far away to give her any, but we can save a few for us to eat.  Maybe make some pear butter (yummy!) 

If these fresh fruits and veggies would only last longer.  I'd love to eat them throughout our long winter, but that's not gonna' happen.  So drying is our best bet here and everything tastes so good.

We have two guys over this morning, Alex is splitting and stacking our wood, Chris is working on getting all our outside repairs done before winter hits with a vengeance.  My logger friend Bob was here two summers ago and cut down five trees fairly close to the house.  He cut them in lengths exactly right for our little wood stove and we've left them lay out there ever since.  They have dried very nicely and now are perfect for splitting, which is what's happening today.

This is supposed to be a milder winter, which to me means a little warmer but lots more snow so we should be set for firewood.  I hope we don't need much this year because of our recently installed heat pump force air heater.  But if we have a power outage we will be warm.  We normally go through about two cords of wood in the winter, this year maybe half a cord if we are lucky. 

One of our rain gutters is coming apart at a seam so that's getting fixed as well as our screen doors the dogs also use.  They're not very careful so the doors are sagging.  Chris is remarkable and can fix or build just about anything.  He's also been working on and off building shelves in the kitty room where we can store dog / cat food off the floor as well as putting our snowy winter clothes there.  We just hang them up until they dry.  Lots of those usually.  The new heater was placed in that room too, and he built a nice closet type enclosure to cover everything up.

Now all that's left after today is to finish putting the drywall back in the living room over the heater duct work where they had to cut out our wood ceiling.  What a great job these guys did.  Its been since Feb or March of this year, but I've gotten so used to looking at it, I don't even notice any more.  But who would put in a red cedar ceiling in the first place.  Oh well, its a conversation piece.  And this pic is my ceiling, not the floor ad the ducting is hanging under the ceiling because of the upstairs floor joists that run the other way.