Each day brings its little challenges. Today's was having to use brute force to prepare our bed for the changing seasons. To beat the challenge of morning rain my husband went out after breakfast to cut the grass. When he was finished with that we had a date; to turn over the mattress in our bed. We bought that mattress fifteen years ago. It is a Queen-sized pillow-top set with as many springs as the stars in the Milky Way. It's cumbersome, awkward, heavy to negotiate. But there's a 'spring' side and a 'winter' side and every year the mattress is meant to be turned over. So it was our job to turn the thing over to its winter side (wool) from its spring side (silk).

All mattresses should be turned over routinely winter/spring gimmick aside, to make certain they wear evenly.

We tackled it together as we always do, but truth to tell, it's my husband who does all the work. Usually we manage quickly and without any trouble, this time it went not-so-quick and was a downright pain. But it did get done, and I changed the bed coverings as well from spring/summer mode to fall/winter.

Since we've been having light meals often during the hot days of summer we decided to match the cool day with a barbecue dinner, so I put together lean ground beef, grated onion, an egg, salt, pepper, garlic powder and rough-grain mustard along with bread crumbs  into sizeable hamburgers. And prepared as well a cole-slaw salad for dinner tonight as a match for the hamburgers.

Then off we went to the ravine for our daily ramble, taking along raincoats for our puppies, and forgetting to bring their leashes, though they were wearing their harnesses. We leave them off-leash, but if, during our trail walks we come across potential problems, we usually put them temporarily on leash. No problems today; we met up with some ravine-walking friends and Jackie and Jillie had ample opportunity to play.

And we came across some quite interesting fungal growth; a colony of bright orange, tiny fungi growing out of the downed limbs of a dead old poplar. And a white colony of small white fungi marching up the dead trunk of a cherry tree; all of them worth a photograph, I felt.