Tradition in our house is to watch White Christmas on the first snow fall of the year. When we lived in Langley, this was a challenge, since snow usually felt in the form of melted snow so you had to make due. Here, snow can arrive anytime so you have to be ready. Jeff, preparing, has ordered a 4K version of White Christmas that has yet to arrive…the snow, however, had other plans! October 31st we saw flakes falling, just in time for Halloween.
It has been cold, and our lessons learned from previous years is that you cannot leave your pumpkins out or they become frozen and useless. The carving must happen a day or two before and they have to live in your house until it is time! As it was, the pumpkins were not the greatest this year – I ended up bringing some back from Lethbridge a few days earlier, and even one of those rotted before we got to carving. Sooo…loving the idea of throwing a bit of a family party, we did just that. Working between volleyball practices and driving lessons, we squeezed in a bit of monster mash to liven things up.
The end result was a pretty good batch of pumpkins and a lot of roasted pumpkin seeds!
Being that we live in the middle of a field on the outskirts of the city, it was unlikely that we would have any treaters showing up at our door. They would have to brave the long dark driveway first and take a chance that the pumpkins on the porch were for real. I still was hopeful though and having not shaken the need to buy a thousand pieces of candy (for anyone who can remember the John Street alley era of our lives) I stocked up. I did show some restraint though and only bought enough to fill the canning pot come witches cauldron that sits by the door each year.
There was much “aw mom”-ing as the sympathy for me and my love of Halloween grew. On the night, not a one showed at our door, but we had some fun anyway! Margaret went off for a sleepover at a friends house in Bayne’s Lake, Lizzie went to a party with some of her friends with a bit of trick or treating on the side, and Mary teamed up with her buddy Bode to clean up in town. Jeff and I ferried to and from and in between, and watched our favorite Halloween movie, Sleepy Hollow. I, as is tradition, watched a portion of this movie while napping next to him on the couch.
In the realm of things not Halloween, we have installed our second-hand hot tub, acquired in the last couple of weeks and from our old land lords in Galloway. After some fenagling and some heave-ho from our work crew (Margaret, Mary, me and Jeff) we got it moved onto the patio. It took a few more days of set up and water testing to get it going, but we now have a working hot tub, and the family meetings can resume! Still working out the kinks on the in’s and out’s since Grandma’s bathroom doubles as the hot tub shower, but so far it’s not too bad. We can also get at the master bath through the patio door, so we are using that if the other is occupied.
School volleyball is wrapping up, and Mary and her team placed third in the East Kootenay tournament that happened this weekend. Lizzie’s team still goes undefeated, high pressure there, and their East Kootenay tournament is next weekend. They are also slated to take to the berth in the Junior Championships happening in two weeks in Surrey. Lizzie and I will be traveling to that, whipping in and out of town again.
We are settling into the idea winter now, refocusing on catching up on the chores that have been left while we try to get the house settled. Jeff did a tour of the draw to find all the burdock and lit it up a day or two ago in the front yard. We have some equipment to get moved and covered and have some landscaping to try to get done before the ground starts to freeze. There are piles of dirt destined for landscaping that may just remain until the spring if we don’t get a stretch of dry weather in the next couple of weeks. We’ve moved half of the mound behind the house and smoothed it out, but there is half remaining and another great mound at the back of the property that needs to be moved to the front of the house to level out the ground there. The septic field is also a series of piles, and we have some hazard marking to do so we know where things are when the land is a sea of white! We have loads of gravel to come to smooth out the parking area, but with the snow yesterday, the folks at the gravel pit declined. That will change hopefully with a warm patch, we are above zero today and no rain in the forecast. It will be a work day outside.