Wordless Wednesday

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I Would(n't) Walk 500 Miles

 I've been a bit scattered about the CBWC, with visitors and Thanksgiving and various assorted other stuff. I had plans to try to walk in some more interesting places with friends, and the friends are willing but the friends are also of a similar certain age, so the plans have not yet come together. Plus the Cool Bloggers Book Club is also happening, and apparently there is a limit to how cool I can be in a single month. 

Walking around the neighbourhood has not been terrible.

There are pretty trees.

There are creepy dolls left for the garbage or scavengers, or demons looking for something to inhabit

Anyone need a sink?

There was this Red Car Convention.

Now there are Halloween decorations - Lucy used to growl at them but she's older and more jaded now. 

There was a lot of yoga-ing.

Lucy helping

There was a treadmill session or two.

And today Pam and Lucy and I got out for a good forest ramble on a gorgeous day.

A lot of people have used the 'ten minutes of intentional movement' prompt to get moving and then keep moving for much longer than ten minutes. Which is wonderful, obviously. But I remember Zarah once saying "We told my friend's boyfriend that we said we would just go to the gym and do twenty minutes and then we could leave and he said 'and then you did a whole workout?' and we said 'no, we did the twenty minutes and left." Many days this month I was tempted to do nothing, and only did ten or twenty or thirty minutes of movement. And I think that is okay - good, even. 

Not Enough Baking Soda In the World

 A few weeks ago when our neighbours were in Italy, I got a text from a number that didn't have a contact assigned while I was at work on Monday morning. It was from their daughter, and their dog had been sprayed by a skunk and tracked it all through the house. She was letting me know that they had blocked off Lucy and Riley's dog door in the fence because the grass still smelled like skunk and they wanted to prevent Lucy from going and rolling in it.

They handled it all so well. Yvonne said her sister picked up the plastic suits when it happened, but I have a small suspicion she has a serial killer side gig, to which I say, go girl, nice hustle. 

"How have I come to this?"

For some reason we just said 'good job' and moved on with our lives. Why did we do that? Did we think there was only one skunk in the world? Did we think the skunk had done its damage and moved on? Why would we think that? Why were we so moronically blissfully complacent? WHY?

Monday evening, Eve's friends had just left after painting their pumpkins. Angus was downstairs watching tv. Matt was on a work call. Eve had just gone upstairs to get ready to shower. I let Lucy out and then started to clean up the table.

I heard Lucy scratching to get in - a little more enthusiastically than normal, maybe, but I didn't think anything of it. I opened the door, then picked up a chair and carried it out to the dining room table. As soon as I plunked it down, I smelled a weird kind of burning smell. Idiotically, I looked down as if to ensure that I had not started a fire by somehow introducing the wood of the chair leg to the wood of the floor. Then I turned my head to the right and saw Lucy frantically scrubbing herself on the carpet of the bottom stair.

I grabbed her around her middle and screamed for Matt, and the kids, and possibly the national guard (Canada doesn't have a national guard). Everyone jumped into action pretty impressively: I got Matt to open the back door and chucked Lucy outside as gently as possible. Matt somehow apparated a Rubbermaid bin and I googled what to put in it and dispatched Eve to find hydrogen peroxide. We dumped in baking soda and peroxide and dish soap and warm water and bathed Lucy thoroughly on the back step. Then Angus and I took her up for a normal bath while Eve and Matt used the little green machine on the stairs - fortunately she had only touched the first two, but the house was filled with a poisonous stinging miasma. 

We texted our neighbours so they would know the skunk was around again (as if they wouldn't have figured it out).

We got Lucy as dry as possible, then realized her head and neck were still bad because we'd been avoiding her eyes. We put her back in the bath and filled the sink with the peroxide mixture to go over her head and neck, then rinsed her eyes thoroughly,.

We put a blanket on Eve's bed for her and she spent the next half hour diving into it, then peaking out reproachfully as if to say "you thundering idiots, the smelly thing is OUT THERE". We lit a bunch of candles and opened a bunch of windows, but there's not a lot that's effective. The boys were fine, but Eve and I were headachey and nauseated. Eve said "we should be so much more grateful that every animal can't do this. And that skunks aren't bigger."

For the next few days I was really careful every time I let Lucy out. Unfortunately, it has become clear that the skunk has taken up residence under our back step, beside the furnace intake. So skunk smell is seeping into our house and everything is very terrible. We had someone come and set a trap yesterday, but it was pouring rain so the skunk presumably stayed cozy under the step. If the trap remains skunkless tonight, we will have to resort to drastic measures because I cannot live like this. I don't feel good about it, believe me! I know the other side of this is a heartwarming children's book about a poor misunderstood mephitid who only wants to make friends and live its life. 

Sorry Sammy, NOT ON MY WATCH

Skunks need a place too. Unfortunately their place cannot be this close to my place because I can't breathe or see or live in my house. I can't seem to remember a time Before the Skunk. We paid someone a considerable amount of money to come and set a trap two days ago with the promise that they would come back and remove it once the skunk went in the trap. The skunk has not gone in the trap. We have sprinkled coyote urine and garlic powder and put out bright lanterns and so far the skunk has resisted all efforts at eviction. I ordered a cheap bluetooth speaker because my friend said they played podcasts loudly until their skunk left. 

Okay, I wrote all this yesterday when my head was pounding and I felt like crap, which may have just been general allergies rather than skunk reaction - apparently our long fall with no frost has been brutal on the allergy front. Today I am feeling a little more sanguine about the whole thing. My friend took Lucy for a couple of days while we worked this problem. I picked her up today and we're just monitoring her when she goes out so she doesn't go for round two with our malodorous guest. It's colder today and the smell isn't quite as pervasive. We got a one-way door that we're zip-tying to some chicken wire and that will be our next step.

And then? I don't know. Throw a rave in the back yard? Cage match with Lucy? Exorcism? 

Pumpkin Patching

Content warning: a billion pictures. 

In 2019, Eve and her super-tight group of friends (Marianna, Davis, Alison and Jackson) asked me to take them to the pumpkin patch nearby. I said I would, on the condition that I could take, like, an obnoxious number of pictures and she said that was largely the point - also they wanted to get pumpkins and paint them. 

It was a ton of fun, because they are a ton of fun.

I got one of my all-time favourite pics of them as a group.

We assumed this would be a tradition now, kind of forgetting that they only had one more year of high school. When we remembered we thought, oh well, we can do it next year at least.

Oh wait......

So we adapted - All the kids and Marianna's beautiful wonderful mom, Di.

The following year Marianna was in Vancouver and Alison was in Toronto, so we had a scaled-down version. 

2022 we lost Jackson (exam) but Alison came home.

2023 -Eve, Jackson, Davis and her boyfriend Tristan

It rained.

Last year - Eve, Davis and Jackson

(Close-up for the Doc Mary Janes)

This year - Eve, Davis and Jackson (the boyfriend is still in play, just did not come here for Fall Break).

"Guys, there's animals!" And these young adults ran away from me for the sheep and goats.

I love them so much.