Yeah, I know… shame on me.
So! This weekend we typically have something called Harvest Dinner. The kids have renamed it “Fakesgiving”. A few years back I decided that it was much less hectic to have our family Thanksgiving in October, thus freeing up everyone to share the November feast with friends and other families. Doesn’t hurt that it’s one of the busiest times for the chorus schedule, so it’s a win-win for me.
Our normal thing to do is to go picking Granny Smith apples – not Stayman, not Fuji, just Granny Smith – and then we head over to the pumpkin fields and choose our victims – ahem – pumpkins for carving. (I think we are all too fond of Dexter) It’s always enjoyable to be wandering around the farm and re-connecting with Mother Earth and her bounty. Gives a bit of meaning to the concept of Harvest Dinner, right?
Well, maybe not this year. I checked the local farms and there are no apples left to be picked. Wha?? No apples?? The recorded message says we can come to their farm and buy pre-picked apples from bins in their festive barn, but all the apples had been plucked from the trees. Darn!! I was bummed about that, but hey, there were still the fields of bright orange pumpkins to go wandering through, so all was well.
Last night, in the space of maybe an hour, it went from sunny and warm to blustery, gray and COLD. Parents and students were coming in for rehearsal with chattering teeth and flimsy jackets wrapped tightly around themselves. Apparently, none of us had seen this drastic weather change coming. I kept hearing the mention of a four letter word – in a CHURCH, already – over and over again.
SNOW
Really?! It’s not even November yet, but there it is. Surely they mean flurries, right? Eh, no. There is a Winter Storm Watch out for Saturday (shouldn’t that be Fall Storm Watch?), which is of course, the Harvest Dinner. Considering they are predicting a 90% chance of precipitation, with 1-3 inches of that lovely white stuff a possibility, I doubt we’ll be at the farm. Instead, I guess I’ll have to find some pre-picked pumpkins to gouge and carve.
On other fronts, we went house-hunting again. It’s now been over a year that we’ve been in this process. Since we started, we’ve finished the basement and cleaned out years worth of “schtuff” and given it away. (I don’t know what I’m going to do when I don’t live on a main drag where I can put out any item, and I do mean ANY item, with a FREE sign next to it and have it gone within 24 hours) All we have left to do is to put on a new deck and we’ll be ready to put this puppy on the market. If it sells, great. If not, it’s finally the way I’ve wanted it and I’ll be happy here until I find the new house, which we thought we’d done last weekend. It was the first house that Hubby had fallen for. It had been empty for awhile when we saw it on Saturday, but by Monday it had two contracts on it. So we decided to go looking again this weekend. Little did we know we’d be looking during a snow storm, but hey… at least we’ll know if the heat works.
Since Halloween is right around the corner, one of the houses we are looking at was built in 1885 and used to be a place where they made tombstones. It sits next to a graveyard, which I don’t mind. The neighbors are always quiet when you live next to a graveyard. Hubby is quick to point out that maybe it’s not actually a graveyard, but more of an old showroom.
Snippets and Tidbits 