Neighborhood Walk & Random Updates

On my birthday, I took a little walk around the neighborhood. My original vision was a family walk, but when I tried to recruit, only J was truly interested (Cute W would have come, but we all know it would have been a Pity Walk. I don’t need no stinkin’ Pity Walk). Anyway, we were barely halfway down the driveway when J announced that she was in the mood to run. So it turned out to be an all-by-myself walk, punctuated by the occasional visit when J circled back.

Okay, can I just say that if Ebola were spreading like the Little Free Libraries are spreading throughout Niskayuna, I’d have our whole family wearing decontamination suits right now. It’s nuts. I think that I mentioned that now there’s one across the street from us. J paused her jog long enough to do a quick inventory check.

DSC00007

And then we headed to visit the newest one, at Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church:

DSC00009

On the way home, I noticed a scarecrow who had collapsed on our neighbor’s lawn:

 

DSC00010

Even though it looks a little bit like it’s dead, I was delighted to see it. That’s because we’ve consistently had a collapsed scarecrow on our front lawn, too. In fact, I’ve been calling it the scarecorpse:

DSC00011

He was attached to our lamppost at one point, then leaning up against a tree, but it seems that any time he appears to be secure, one of my (damn) kids decides that he needs to be moved or incorporated into some sort of game, and then they lean him up in a haphazard way, and next thing you know, the poor guy’s slumped over again.

Which reminds me, speaking of wanton destructiveness in support of play, did I already tell you that my kids energetically raked a whole massive pile of leaves? Except, they didn’t rake the leaves on our lawn. They raked the leaves on the public median. And then they brought the big pile of leaves from the public median onto our lawn. They like to jump off our tree swing into a big pile of leaves, and apparently our lawn wasn’t supplying enough for them.

A while back I wrote a blog post about buying costumes instead of making them. I wanted to point out three things about this post.

1. You should just look at it, because those kids are adorable.

2. And also because I found a picture of M dressed as a witch that didn’t appear in the post originally because I couldn’t find it.

3. The other day, I’d pulled out the little witch doll from that picture along with a whole bunch of other decorations, and when M saw it, she gasped and said, “It’s you! Hello, you! Oh I love her so much, I missed her. She is my favorite Halloween thing.”

I also wrote a blog post where I wrote fake captions for various Halloween pictures. Actually, I thought I’d written it a long time ago, because this is one of the posts I’ve re-read several times. Which I don’t usually do all that much, but for some reason I can’t help myself with this one.

It’s off-topic, but we’re watching Parks and Recreation right now, and that reminds me that members of my family have called me Leslie Knope twice in the last week. Which, I believe, is a profound compliment.

And speaking of tv, I’m proud to report that I’ve resisted binge-watching every single episode of Gilmore Girls, now available via instant Netflix. Impressive, right? I’ve only spent, like, four or five hours on it.

 

3 Comments

  1. Big Sister

    I feel like it is time for you to take the stand up comedy routine on the road. But you’ll have to have slides in the background – ’cause dang, those Halloween kids are cute.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *