Opuntia

Prickly Pear cactus, also known as ficus-indica or barberry fig. It has a  particularly fine crop of spines a fact to which I can attest as my hand brushed one of the nopales, or paddles, and the little spines fairly lept into my thumb. I felt particularly daft as I stood there in the parking strip  next to the farmers' market picking spines out of myself. They probably planted spiny cactus in those strips expressly to discourage people like me from wandering around in them. They look like they've been there a long time....

Reminded me of a time when we were staying in the Colorado desert over Thanksgiving and we let the dogs out for a run. They came back full of cactus spines that had to be removed one by one. We went with a group of friends and were staying at a Colorado College retreat center, reserved by one of our group who was on the faculty at the time. It was an ill fated trip in many ways as half of us, the ones who had second helpings of turkey, spent two days in our narrow student beds victims of food poisoning, probably from an inadequately cooked turkey...

But back to me standing in the cactus patch next to the farmers' market.
We had already bought squash and green beans and an apple pie for Thanksgiving dinner, lugged our heavy purchases back to the car and were on the way back in search of the 'metal man' with the wings made of cutlery. He wasn't there. Not in his usual place  or in any other stall. We both remembered me asking him last week if he would be there this week and we both remembered him saying yes.  But he wasn't there. Thinking back, I wasn't too surprised, since the email domain on his card couldn't be found, and he never responded to the phone message I left for him. It has occurred to me what a lot of work it must be for him to load and unload a large number of heavy sculptures every week. I hope he's ok.
 
I spent the afternoon altering a tablecloth to fit our table. It has languished in a drawer for years because I bought it for a larger table and it is really too big for our current one.  I was hoping it was big enough for two tables, since there will be 12 of us for Thanksgiving and we'll need to bring the folding table up from the garage. I pondered several solutions but in the end made it the size to fit our regular table with only enough left over to make a runner. Locating the ironing board, and realizing that it is in desperate need of a new cover was also involved. 

John, in the meantime was outside picking leaves out of the garden. It was really windy last night and did a pretty good job of blowing a ton of leaves off the trees, embedding them in and under the shrubbery.  The ground is still thickly blanketed but he wanted to pick the leaves off the plants as the tannins in the oak leaves damage them. Easier said than done....