Month: October 2024

As we travel farther from the sun in our elliptical orbit these mornings are going to get down right cold in a hurry. Oh we may have a warm spell that keeps things toasty between 11:00am and 3:00pm, but don’t you doubt for a second that WINTER IS COMING! I have to adjust my schedule to include defrosting the vehicle windows, soon to add scrapping off ice, and clearing snow from the driveway too. Yikes. It’s all downhill from here until we finish out the year. Not to mention the kids now need sweaters, long pants, socks, oh my the socks! Jackets, hats, and mittens. Soon to be boots, full on winter coats, snow pants, neck ring scarves, gloves of all shapes and sizes, toques and more. Once winter really hits, the mornings fill up fast with so many additional details, tasks, and moments of panic. Sounds like fun to me.

Friday is here. The long weekend is here too. My nephew, whom is two years of age, broke his foot the day before yesterday, so I don’t think they are heading north for Thanksgiving. And the weather is to be cold, rainy, and unpleasant so I don’t think my inlaws are going either. So we may have a very rare Thanksgiving weekend not closing up the cottage and winterizing all of the motorized things. Next weekend we are off to Rama for a show, so that’s out too. Might have to go up mid week to do any of those tasks if we catch a dry & warm patch some time soonish.

I for one am fine with it. I like being home. This is where my stuff is. This is where I am most comfortable. We still have the farm, and grandma’s house, and the nephew/niece we can visit with (although the boy is down with a singular broken bone in his foot). Tough luck from a random tumble he took with his tiny two year old wobbly legs. He’ll bounce back, at that age the bones are soft, plyable, and easily mended.

If we are home then we can dig up and dry off the Dahlias that are all over the property. I can do one morning of leaves with the mulcher back pack bagger. If we’re all home anyway, then that might make sense to do. I could find a matinee for the kids to go see. Or walk the dog someplace we’ve never gone to spice things up. I don’t know, it’s all up in the air right now. No firm plans have been decided yet.

We could, as a family clean this house back to how nice it looked prior to the Markham Fair entry creation bonanza. Get all the paper, popsicle sticks, glue sticks, glitter, rocks, glue guns, foam pieces, and whatever else organized and put away back where they belong. Make it so we can see/use the island counter top, and dining room table top for eating on once again. I don’t know, that could be fun? Right? Yeah – right. No chance.

I’m still riding the high from garbage day where I managed to get 200lbs worth of scrap metal taken away. It had been stored, and taking up space in the garage for years. Doors, light fixtures, rusted tool box, planer stand, old lawn mower handle bits, broken lawn wind ornament, busted stroller, old engine from another lawn mower, aluminum wheel braces, and whatever else I could manage to move by myself on short notice. All gone. I have regained all of that space on my shelves. It’s wonderful. I wish I could have gotten the old water softener, and brine tank out too, but it’s all plastic, resin, fiberglass and not really metal, so no chance the scrap folks would have taken it. Plus it’s super heavy, and my inlaws have my dolly (still). I don’t fancy putting my back out to lift both of those items out of my basement by myself. I have straps and ratchets so it wouldn’t come off the dolly, but not a task I can just walk away from once I get it onto the staircase. Stairs are too narrow, and too often used to abandon a heavy object on to rest up and try again later. This is a time when a straight walk out basement would have been very, very handy. No such luck here I’m afraid.

On the other hand I did clear a bunch of crap out from the garage! Yeah buddy! Got some old bags removed from a closet in the basement too. It’s all coming up aces (eventually). Now if I could get the two boxes full of burnable cut off scraps up to the cottage, and the children’s play kitchen taken up there too, I’d be jumping for joy. There’s always something that needs doing, so my celebration period is rather short after each task completes successfully. Sorting and organizing. Throwing away broken, dried up, ruined crafting materials. Recycling papers, and emptying drawers. These are the things I both love to do (reclaim the storage space) but hate to do (so tedious, and why am I the only one who cares about us keeping all this crap anyway?) But I digress.

Since it’s such a chilly morning, I’m going to wait until closer to eleven to walk the dog at the farm. Either that, or I need to find long johns and a scarf. I don’t fancy a cold blast to the mouth. Twenty plus years of Crohn’s has not done my teeth any favours. Can you say “sensitivity aversion”. Because I can. Five months out of the year I speak it’s vile name whilst in despicable nerve pain. Fun times.

And on that bomb shell, I bid you adieu. Ciao Bella!

So many awful things happening in the state of Florida. Not just hurricane Milton but off shoot tornadoes as well, how very unlucky. Tidal surges of up to fifteen feet in additional height, wind gusts up to 180 MPH, and everything associated with flooding, and high winds damage. It does feel a bit like voyeurism sitting in our comfy, dry home a thousand miles away watching this stuff unfold on CNN. I think my wife just gets a kick out of seeing Anderson Cooper suffer out in the elements every so often when she knows he’s worth 50 million easy, and his family had a couple hundred billion back in their heyday.

We had like three inches of snow melt flood our basement nearly a decade ago, and all the flooring, about 2 ft of drywall on every wall had to come out. Rugs, books, clothes that went mouldy all had to get tossed. Furniture was warped and ruined. It happened while we were away in Florida of all things. Small world. So I can’t imagine the ruin of 15 feet worth of sewage, salt water, dead bodies, and general sludge would do to your average home. Storm shutters, stilts, and cinderblocks be damned I guess.

My father inlaws place in the Keys is set to only get 1-3 ft of surge waters, so perhaps the bbq will float away, and the hot tub will shift across the property line, or fill up with crud, but it’s a storm the place should weather. It gets bolted up tight, strapped down, and chained for all it is worth, right down into the coral foundations upon which it is situated. Unlike Irma, this particular storm was bad farther north up the state, towards Tampa Bay. I hope Busch Gardens fares well, and the animals are all ok!

It feels pretty wild to watch houses break up, and float away on live television. Not much you can do when mother nature gets riled up, and wants to unleash hell. Best to not make things worse! Much like Neil Degrasse Tyson, I too am surprised we’ve never found a way to harness the power of major storms like these to produce energy for ourselves. Just think of all the gigawatts left unharnessed when these category 3, 4, 5’s roll by blowing shit up unmolested. Now there’s a humanitarian project. Imagine portable power generators placed in the path of upcoming storms generating energy to be used by clean up crews, towns, cities while they repair themselves, captured from the very storms that ruined the area. Oh to dream.

I still don’t quite understand why they feel the need to place live anchors out into the storms for video coverage. The wind, and rain makes the audio terrible, and the poor people can hardly hear what’s being asked of them, or said during their on air segments. It’s a weird form of torture for on air personalities. Pay back for the cushy desk job? I don’t really know.

I think it was after hurricane Maria that we ventured down to the Keys about four months after the storm passed by, when we saw first hand just how much debris, and damage was caused. Belongings piled up down the roads, trees, leaves, and brush piles forty feet tall on the vacant lots, just endless miles of garbage piles waiting to be trucked out to somewhere else. It was wild. Smelled kinda funky too. My father in law had to pull out the entire kitchen, appliances, flooring, drywall, light fixtures, just about everything and start again. He made the floors vinyl tiles that would weather the salt water, and could be pulled up & washed thoroughly of bacteria etc… then get put back when the sub flooring was replaced. The surge waters wound up pouring in over the top of the door. Otherwise the first nine feet of the surge was unnoticed. Tough luck on that one.

Thursday today. I folded and put away about five loads of the girls laundry yesterday. Didn’t take me the whole 90 minutes like I was expecting, but it did take me 75, so I was pretty, pretty, pretty close in my estimation. The house is getting cooler too. I’m trying to not turn on the furnace yet. I think the next step is to close the windows entirely. All September the windows were wide open. Then I left them all open just a crack. Next is shut them up tight, and then we can think about the furnace. That first burning of dust is so smelly. I swapped out the furnacevfilter last Friday, so that’s still good for another 90 days, or there about. We will have a warmer period coming, there usually is another 10-21 days of 11°C/17°C sunny days coming in late October and early November. That’s when I do the bulk of the leaves. Though, truth be told I did mulch up at least two bagging days worth with the mower because I wasn’t in the mood to start leaves just yet. I have no other choice for the rest of October, as I have all of our Halloween decorations up on the lawn, and wired in. Now I will have to bag up the leaves, as I can’t use the lawn mower with all that fabric lying around, and guide wires stuck out of the ground. The grass atleast isn’t doing too much right now anyway. Take care out there. Ciao Bella!

I do not know if it’s a clinical thing or not but when the temperature dips below 11°C my calves, knees, thighs, lower back, and chest itch like a son of a gun. I can do the same walk from May to September with nary an issue, get into October and I’ll wind up having to scratch myself raw from all of the itching. Like a flipped switch, all is good, to every nerve in my lower extremities itches so, so very badly. I kinda hate it. So I either have to wait to walk the fog a bit later in the say down at the farm, only after the sun is fully risen, and warmed up, or I need to bust out the thermal wear, and bundle up from here on out until May 1st. Yay! Fun.

It is Wednesday today, and I have a mound of laundry to sort that’s about four feet tall, and six feet in diameter. The fair really 8nterrupted our household for four days. I was still washing clothes, just not putting them away. The girls were still wearing new clothes (obviously), so the pile just grows and grows. I need my stereo for this job, it’ll likely take about 90 minutes to sort between the three of them, then hang every thing up in the appropriate closets. Whee!

Let us pray the dog got enough exercise to not be a pest while I put all these clothes away. Loud music to the rescue!

And you better believe we mark it on the calendar because missing a garbage collection is a massive inconvenience. Recycling, and green bins go every week, you miss a cardboard collection, oh well, not a big deal, seven days later it’s gone. But if the garbage man surprises you by showing up at 7:00am on the dot rather than 4:45pm, or 6:00pm like they usually do, whoo-boy! That’s a problem. Storing stinky garbage for two weeks taking with any new accumulation gets messy. Also not guaranteed it will all get taken. We have a three can limit. Which sometimes is enforced as a three bag limit. So we have to juggle bag sizes if we have excess trash from an event or new purchase.

The last time we had garbage day it was also a large item disposal day, do couches and stuff were out on the curb. That meant it was going to be a long, long day for the trucks. Slow going, and heavy. Maybe I should have put the old water softener, and brine tank out. Probably should have, but my inlaws still have my dolly. I should probably just go buy a new one. I’d prefer not to but the odds of me getting my own back on a permanent basis are slim to none. Small price to pay, and all that…

Tuesday in early October. The fair has come and gone, now we turn to look towards Thanksgiving, and then Halloween. Am I sad that we won’t be skipping a huge portion of the grey, and dreary month of November? Yes, yes I am, but that just means that we can lean into Christmas really hard this year. I went out grocery shopping yesterday and picked up some skeletons, and more inflatables for the front lawn. I’m in spooky month mode right now, and not yet even thinking about winter and Christmas. We have at least one birthday/party to sort out first. Although she is ok having the tree up, and exterior lights on the house before her birthday. Christmas is the real big to do around here, so spending six weeks with decorations up, music playing, food and themed sweaters is kinda fun. We do have to work hard to create a mood. One which, I will say, my wife does not feel, nor share. If I didn’t do the tree, and lights it would not happen. She’s no scrooge, just not festive, like at all. I don’t know what spoiled Christmas for her, but she does not feel any kind of seasonal joy around late November and into December. I can’t fix it for her, but I try to add some festive joy for the kids.

Well I need to move some scrap metal out of the garage, so I best hop to it.

Not going to lie, I love this time of year. Perhaps not spending hours doing leaves, but I like the crisp air, sunshine, and lack of stinging, biting bugs. We put our original set up out yesterday, the kids and I. Today I picked up a couple more cheap inflatables, and two sizes of skeleton. One full size glow in the dark fella, and a three footer to hang on the front door. It’s all very festive looking now. I sorted out the chords so I can get seven inflatables running, and one light up pumpkin. The kids want to do bloody hand prints on the doors, and windows again. So I need to dig out the red acrylic paint. I do hope they keep their expressionist designs to the glass, and not on the brick work like last year! Still scrapping tiny red hand prints off the front entrance. Very in season right now though.

I know that in previous years I managed to hit twenty, and twenty four plus hours logged walking around the fair, but this year I am happy to stop my joyous experience at a mere eighteen hours. My main concern is leaving the dog at home alone unattended for another stretch of hours. He hasn’t been very happy about our collective absences, so I’m happy to sit out most of day four to keep him company. I wish my step counter had of worked, as I think we would have covered 20,000- 30,000 steps each day, and easily more than that over the 9 hours spent walking the midway on saturday alone. My heels, ankles, hips and lower back can all attest to the much heightened uptick in bodily movement for the last three days. So much concrete, gravel, and asphalt to stand on, and walk around on. So, so much of it. Very unforgiving.

The dust plume that you can see hanging over the fair grounds is both a good sign that lots of people are attending, and a bad sign for both sneezing, and dry eyes the very next day. A tiny bit of drizzle each day keeps it to a minimum usually, but we had spectacular weather this year – again, with little to no rain, and not too intense heat, so the grounds were optimal for the high volumes of people. Bugs were minimal thanks to the very cool nights, which is a plus. Last year was so very hot the wasps were out in full force, not so this year. Thankfully.

I missed the horse pull, but we did catch the various categories of tractor pulls, and we saw some of the demolition derby through the heavy crowds. My eldest daughter and I saw all three nights of fireworks in a row too! The last was from the car on the drive home. We pulled off the road to watch it with music playing in the warmth of the vehicle.

Today is lazy Sunday. The kids want to start decorating for Halloween. I’d like to but I’m kind of tired right now. My hips ache. But, I will say this; setting them up is somewhat easier than taking them down because they are all ready dry, and I have all the pieces sorted in each box. I want to walk the dog first though. So maybe I should go do that now, and start earlier. Ciao Bella!

Blurb. Short but sweet, like plum sauce on a freshly deep fried chicky tendy. Sweet like a frosty mug of cold iced tea. Short like a… well. Let’s just say short shall we, and leave it at that. Blurb.

I slightly surpassed last years fourth place with a 3rd place finish for my Ogre Guard hand painted & sculpted ceramic bust. Well done me. Love to see it. Being the only item I entered I am glad it placed at all! Podium for me. Bronze! Glad I got something. Ha.

The kids are in bed asleep still, and it is almost nine. I wanted them to go to school because I thought we’d be home by 9pm. But never gonna stop grandpa kept us out until after 10pm, so when we finally got home, changed, hair brushed, teeth cleaned, and squared away it was nearly eleven o’clock. Let us just say that their wake up was atrocious, and full of tears, and all out crying. So back to bed for another 2-3 hours. No tablets today. Hand writing, maths, reading are the order of the day. Plus we need to heavily exercise the dog as he missed out on walks with us gone. I need to rake leaves, and cut the grass too. I have paid work on the docket, so I need to work around the day job. Should be a jam packed day ahead.

Been a morning already hasn’t it? Big farm walk in the cool autumn air, wet grass soaking through my inappropriate footware (for such an occasion), and the dog took off like a shot to chase every single four legged creature making a home upon the property. Good. Glad he is tired. I’ve fed him his breakfast, Nd now I can focus on doing my own things now.

Also the adoption agency emailed us to say his neutering appointment should be this month, and not December as we once thought. So that should be a fun few days for dear old Graham. I’ll need to find home a cone to wear to stop him worrying his new found wound(s). To both his anatomy, and his ego! Ha. We’ll likely have matching scares old Grimbo and I. It’s a big part of the adoption agreement that he gets fixed, so we’ve already paid for the surgery. Best of all it gets done in Vaughan and not Barrie, so much closer to home for us! Yeah. Nice.

If I’m correct today is Thursday. The 2024 Markham Fair opens today! The kids and the whole extended family are very excited. Let us see how we feel come 5:00pm Sunday October 6th when it’s all over the another year. Tired aching feet, full bellies, new ride memories, visits with friends from far away, late nights, and cool evening fireworks displays. So much happens in just four days. It’s a whirlwind of activity. I’m pumped.

I could have done with this ear infection clearing up, but it shouldn’t be too much of a hindrance. I’m already hearing impaired so it’s just another few notches worse at the moment. Nothing insurmountable. I really should get on with learning my ASL. It might become a requirement as I age, and my hearing gets worse. I will put a pin in that, to focus on more after the fair is over. Must be a book/course I could find near by that I can pick away at. Learning to lip read might come in handy too. Skills, skills, skills! Gotta have them all.

I see one small task I want to complete right this second while I remember, so I’ll sign off before I forget it – again. Ciao Bella.

Which is what it feels like with this interminable ear infection. Started in one ear now we’re here. With two, no less! Everybody sounds like they are fifty feet away, or mumbling through a wall. It’s very peaceful. Except for my pulse pounding in my ear. That’s quite loud. Also, strangely enough the sound of brushing my teeth was extraordinarily loud these last few days. So… yeah. How are you all doing?

I started another painting recently for my youngest this time, and it has gone pear shaped so I’ve lost interest, and the motivation to continue. I will go back, I just don’t know when. I had high hopes, and dashed those hopes upon my poor technical skills after years of neglect. I can try to resurrect it without a doubt. I had wanted it to go smoothly, and turn out as I had planned. And not be yet another salvage job. But for that to happen I need to paint/draw regularly and that isn’t happening, atleast not right now.

Today begins the judging portion of the Markham Fair. I do not hold out high expectations for my sculpted & painted bust, but you never know. I just like having something at the fair. I don’t ever see people looking at my art, so it certainly isn’t an ego boost, or a dopamine thing. I was proud of it and felt like sharing. Bully for me! There are some very, very talented folks in the area whom show incredible paintings, drawings, quilts and such. Hard to judge a jar of jam from afar, but you can tell the quality of a charcoal sketch from 20 paces.

I am kicking myself for not producing anything brand new for this year, but it’s been an odd few months. I was sick almost all of September with a cough, and this ear infection stole my last second panicked productivity session. My fault. Procrastination at its worst. Glad I had one or two figures in the wings waiting though. Life saver that was! When the feeling hits, I build in bulk. And I’m glad for it. One massive months long session could set me up for several years worth of entries. A real boon on the years where I can’t be bothered to do much of anything other than work, or home DIY projects.

I will say that Diably IV didn’t help me out any, time wise. I’ve put a number of hours into that game that likely should have gone towards a new fair entry. I could play while coughing, I couldn’t do delicate detail work in the same state. That’s what I’m telling myself after the fact anyway.

So it’s Wednesday, Hump Day, Middle of the Week Day, and that means the weekend approaches at speed. The fair will officially open tomorrow for visitors, and it will be a whirlwind of activity and emotions. I look forward to the food the most. An occasional ride here or there. Fireworks and neon lights, music and laughter. There’s a whole lot going on that you can find just about anything you’d like to see. Musicians, dancers, acrobats, fiddlers, and comedians. Beer, burgers, burritos and glass bongs. Quilts, sweaters, blankets, hats and mitts. Exotic food trucks, farm animals, instructional seminars, and performing animal shows. Demolition derby, tractor pulls, and horse teams of every stripe. I warn you now, wear good comfortable walking shoes. I hesitate to wonder what our step counters will read after multiple 8-10 hour sessions walking around showing things to friends. But, with the new dog at home those types of hours might be a thing of the past. Just saying.

If you like Robert Bateman prints there is always a booth selling those massive things in one of the commerce buildings. You can find it by walking passed the candy apple people! Candy apples, candy corn, bulk candy, candy, candy, candy. Tiny Tom’s donuts for an arm and a leg if you so wish. Hard to say no to that. Do you like baby rabbits,  chicks, geese, and calves? Piglets and tiny little lambs? You can find it all at Jurassic Park! Erm… The Markham Fair.