Fall officially arrived last night at 8:05 p.m., though if you've set foot in a Starbucks since August 25 you already knew it was coming.

So pumpkin spice is officially in season, and judging by your coffee choices, most of you welcome it.

Two other smells showed up in our house this weekend, and nobody welcomes either one. Sealant and wasp spray. Both are jobs worth doing in the next couple of weeks. The whole trick to both is making sure you smell the pumpkin spice and not the other two.

Let's start inside.

My daughter was making slime at the kitchen island this weekend. If you have kids, you know the drill. Bowl, glue, food coloring, and a countertop you're trying not to think about. I wiped it up, and while I was standing there with the paper towel I realized I had no idea when I last sealed that counter. Not a vague idea. No idea at all.

Most slime recipes use borax, and borax is highly alkaline, which is one of the things you specifically don't want sitting on granite because it breaks down the sealer over time (House Digest). Vinegar, bleach, and glass cleaner do the same thing (Greeny Place).

You don't have to guess. There's a test, it takes a half hour at the most, and it's more reliable than any calendar rule.

Clean and dry a section of counter. Put a tablespoon of water on it. Then watch. If the countertop soaks it up in 5 minutes, then it’s time to seal. If it pushes 10 minutes before absorbing, save it for next year. If there’s still a bead after 30 minutes, you’ll be good for a while. (SlabWise)

If your countertop is acting like a sponge instead of stone, right now is a great time of year to seal it. By the way, if you have engineered quartz, you don’t have to seal… and you’re fancy.

You do not want to breathe in those fumes, so opening a window in this cool fall weather is ideal. Especially since some sealants are a Category 3 flammable liquid. We use Miracle Sealants 511 Impregnator pretty much on all of our stone. The manufacturer says to use it in a well ventilated area and here are some more tips in this link: Miracle Sealants product data.

You can pick up Miracle Sealants 511 Impregnator at Home Depot or stay home and use this link: amzn.to/4y1k2ho. One bottle handles a full kitchen. Get this done before the holidays beat up your countertop and it’s too cold to crack a window!

Sunday afternoon my daughter was riding her scooter in the driveway and my son was shooting baskets. I looked at the street sign on our corner and there were yellow jackets crawling on it. Not a cloud of them. A few. About twenty feet from both of my kids.

So it got handled that afternoon, with SpectracidePRO Wasp and Hornet Killer Spray (https://amzn.to/4hnkz6o). I won't pretend we were cool about it. The second I sprayed, all three of us ran for the house. Nothing came after anybody, and we stood in the kitchen laughing at ourselves. Same rule as the sealant, really. You don't want to be standing in it.

Two things I liked about it. The jet reaches 20 feet and it's accurate, so I never got close and never climbed anything. And it was over before we finished running, which tells you how fast it works. The label also says it keeps killing the ones that come back for up to four weeks, which matters more than I first thought.

The upside is the calendar is about to handle this for you. Every worker in that nest dies at the first hard frost, and Fairfield averages that October 21 to 31. Back of the yard where nobody walks, you can wait it out. Twenty feet from a scooter, you can't.

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The porch, handed to somebody who does it for a living.

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