We have another really pretty day, but the wind is stripping off the leaves big time!

Fred has been clearing brush on our lower lawn area and I was down there late yesterday afternoon. There is a corner that is blanketed in fallen leaves and for the first time ever I realized I had to inspect my clothing for ticks after walking through them. Like so many other awful occurrences, these days we have to accept that those dangerous little pests are here just like shooters, scammers and deceitful politicians. Kind of spoils a pretty day!

Nevertheless, I enjoyed tramping through the leaves, but I'm really sorry to see so many trees almost bare. The hills around us are turning from dark green and golden to dark green and gray. There is still enough contrast to be strikingly beautiful, though. However, I don't look forward to November and its dreary, dark pre-snow quietness. 

We just cleaned all the "cookies" out of my computer. It has been running very slowly and every time I went into my gmail accounts a notice popped up that my email was not available and "try again." When I "tried again" it opened ok, but having to do that every time was annoying as all get out. 

I just realized that "all get out" is an expression we don't hear much anymore. So I looked it up. It means "to the utmost degree," but there's more. The phrase was originally "as getout" but it meant the same thing - a high degree of something. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the "all" was probably first introduced by Mark Twain in his book about Huckleberry Finn in 1883. Apparently, that stuck and over the years "all get out" was likely substituted for profanity.

 

Fred says I use some strange expressions sometimes. It is probably a combination of my Yankee/Scotch heritage. I was brought up hearing my father's family colloquialisms handed down through generations in Early New England, and my mother's family, all of them fresh off the boat from Scotland. My mother and her younger brother were born in U.S., but all her older sisters (six of them!) came from Scotland in the early 1900s, and they meticulously retained their Scottish dialect - plus my grandfather MacAllan lived with us for a number of years before he died. He had lots of unique expressions, and I learned them all - the good and the not-so-good. Those kinds of childhood habits come to the surface sometimes when I least expect it.