December 17, 8:30 a.m. Headed to work the morning after the season’s first measurable snow.

…when you leave this cozy spot to head out into a dark cold rain to rig a heat lamp to keep your 15 guineas toasty warm.

The guineas have been doing fine (i.e., surviving) the few nights that have gotten down into the teens. But reading the weather report tonight, I discovered that the storm system sweeping eastward may bring subzero wind chills Tuesday night. I know the birds can handle cold, but the wind we’re expected to get may do them in. I am pretty sure their coop is resistant to wind because its so tightly constructed, but I am not entirely sure how much makes its way through and I don’t want to find out by discovering a bunch of two-legged popsicles.

And, I’d rather be doing this mucking around tonight, in a rainy but relatively balmy 35 degrees, instead of Tuesday night after work in a subzero windstorm.

So I hung a shop light over the perch, nailed it in so it wouldn’t fall and catch their house on fire, and then tacked the cord down so the birds wouldn’t hang themselves if they got caught in it. Thankfully the “chicken door” that the birds never liked to use was just loose enough to let an extension cord in, saving me from drilling holes in my perfectly predator-proof coop. We’ll see how long it takes the birds to start pecking at the extension cord. Then I’ll be enjoying flash-fried poultry instead of popsicles. Choose your poison.

I can’t say enough good things about Charlottesville-based Relay Foods. I think they have such a good thing going on that I’d go work for them if they’d have me, and I am encouraging everyone I know to try their service so they stay in business!

Basically I order my groceries online, pay with a credit card, and then once a week I drive to a parking lot a minute away from where I work to pick up my order, all packaged up in a nice big tub. Behind the scenes the little Relay elves travel around to all sorts of local Charlottesville business to fill my order, saving me from driving all over town, and many of their options are locally grown and organic. Plus, their web interface is great, their graphic design makes me smile…as do the nice people who load up my groceries. I haven’t found their prices to be prohibitively expensive, but I am happy to occasionally pay  a bit more to avoid the hassle and time of going to the stores myself. As someone who loves to cook but hates the grocery store, Relay Foods is my glimpse of heaven.

All this is backstory to the real story, which is the joy I felt on Thanksgiving when I opened up the carton of these eggs that were part of my Relay order. The eggs came from Hardy Farms in nearby Keswick, Virginia, and the sheer beauty of them was my nicest holiday surprise. And they were nice and fresh, with big orange yolks that sat high above the white. I’ve enjoyed them in pumpkin pies, cookies, and last weekend, in an out-of-this world spaghetti carbonara, which also included some pretty fantastic bacon from Charlottesville’s Organic Butcher. It was my first time making this dish, but it was so good that I am trying to justify cooking a meal whose main ingredients are pasta, egg yolks, heavy cream, cheese and bacon twice in one week! Thus far my best argument is that it’s ridiculously cold and windy outside now (in fact only a few degrees warmer than Anchorage, Alaska), and I need the fat to survive the winter!

Is falling outside right now!

My fifteen guineas spent the Thanksgiving weekend wandering the fields and exploring the cherry tree near the garage. This is the first time so many have chosen to fly into it, and it was quite a sight. I am glad they are learning to fly into trees because this skill will help protect them from predators. They still aren’t very graceful—and may well never be—but when they find themselves wedged in precarious positions they have managed to work it out.

The recent cold weather and early sunset have put a damper on the pleasure I used to take in caring for them. If I need to feed and change their water when I get home from work in the dark, I shine my car’s high beams at the coop and then juggle a flashlight inside to collect their feeder and waterer. The birds are always calm—with most continuing to sleep on their perches—but it’s awkward work for me. I need to run a light into the coop somehow to make this easier.

This morning I took care of the birds before work, and I knocked a sizable ice floe out of their waterer. And then I went to work and started investigating heated waterers. The idea of paying for the electricity to heat guinea water all winter irks me, but when we start getting into the days that don’t rise above freezing I may not have a choice.

Though the chore of caring for the guineas is diminishing in pleasure, what’s increasing is the enjoyment I take in the birds when they are out of their coop and flying/wandering/running around the property. They are behaving pretty well by sticking close to the house, and they are truly hilarious to watch. When I was mowing on the tractor last week, the whole flock was actually chasing after me!

One of my favorite wild plants is Virginia Creeper. It’s that red plant in the photo below, which I took more than two years ago while wandering back roads in Central Virginia. I think it’s incredibly beautiful vine with an ideally shaped leaf and a gorgeous fall color range from green to gold to red.

I was lucky enough to have some creeper growing up my chimney, but in the course of taking the old house down and building this new one, I seem to have damaged my vine. On a whim I stuck a scraggly stem in a vase of water and set it in my kitchen window. I forgot about it until the other day when I looked up from washing dishes and saw a brand-new leaf, pale green and translucent. Maybe it’s not the end of my creeper!

I don’t love this time of year, when the drive home from work in the dark is a twelve mile deer slalom with a pitch-black house at the finish line. When the moon is hiding, it’s so dark out here that I need a flashlight to find the front door. I walk unsteady up the driveway under the kind of disorienting black sky that opens wide above and makes me feel flipped upside down.

But the reward, once I am safely inside with lights a-blazing, is seeing my house in an entirely new (lack of) light. It’s so beautiful to me that I made pictures while a family of coyotes sang against the mountain.

Through my camera, I caught a glimpse of the soul of this house. Despite the darkness, it was shining.

Of all the fussy tasks involved with this house, the front door has been one of the most annoying. I estimate I’ve spent about 25 hours trying to get this thing right. And that doesn’t even count the numerous conversations with my builder before I moved in because he didn’t install either of my doors properly. The doors weren’t cheap—thousands of dollars each, and I’ve had nothing but trouble with them. Locks that won’t close, cheap weatherstripping, gaps between the door and jamb that let in light and cold air. Suffice it to say, I won’t be recommending Therma-Tru anytime soon.

But this post is really about aesthetics, so to that we go. The front door is a fiberglass door, and one of the reasons I bought it was it was “stainable” to approximate a wood tone. What a great challenge, I thought! How fun!

I did my research, ordered three colors of special gel stain from someplace in Iowa, made sample strips and a decision, and finally applied the stain.

And it was okay. Except for the unevenness and some weird blotchiness. The stain was ridiculously hard to work with, because it didn’t penetrate the surface and instead just sat on top and got gummy. Which meant that any attempt to “fix” bad areas just ended up making the problem worse. If I were to ever stain a fiberglass door again, and I hope never to be assigned such a horrible fate, I would quickly wipe the stain all over it and not touch it again until it dried.

I also didn’t love the dark color. Though it looked passably like wood, didn’t give me a good feeling when I approached it. Which is key! But I figured I could live with it if I could just fix the bad spots. So I tried to correct bad areas by taking off the stain, which required lacquer thinner and probably took years off my life, but no dice. I gave up and went to plan b, which was paint!

So that required a few days of playing with paint chips, and another $40 in Benjamin Moore sample pints. Luckily, among the three colors I chose to sample, I found one I thought would be okay. So back to the paint store for primer to cover the stain and a $20 quart of really nice paint.

And so I continued, dedicating an entire weekend to priming, and then last weekend to painting. The bad news is I am not thrilled with my painting skills, which require quite a bit of touch up that I’ve been doing every night after work this week. And the liberal use of my rationalizing imagination, which is protecting my sanity by telling me that my front door looks like it belongs on a 100-year old dream cottage, all banged up and caked with a century of loving paint applications.

But the good news is I love the color I picked. It is just what I wanted and what I should have just done from the start instead of messing with the stain.

In fact, before I built the house and was playing around with color combinations for siding, trim and door, this was what I came up with as my favorite. I even found an old screenshot I took of the Benjamin Moore Personal Color Viewer, where you can try paint colors on a house that vaguely resembles yours.

Pretty close, huh? Now I just have to muster up the strength to paint the inside of the front door, and then I can cross this odious project off the list.

My favorite thing about fall is the light, which lately has been doing wondrous things.

Testing paint samples last night. Even after the sun went down, the mountain kept tricking my eyes because the gold trees looked like the last reflected rays.

This morning I enjoyed a gorgeous sunrise reflected on the mountains and field out back. That block in the left corner? That’s when I set my cans up to shoot them off the porch.

And the light coming around the front of the house, hitting the Chinese chestnut and burning bush, was pretty great too.

P.S. And when I hit “publish,” I will have officially crossed the 100-post blog threshold. Whewee—triple digits, baby!