Pumpkins and Poseidon
We had a really nice weekend. The weather was perfect - sunny and crisp, but not so cold you couldn't enjoy being out in the sun. Saturday we watched the grandchildren play soccer. Then, after the frost had melted and the lawn had dried out, I mowed the backyard while The Spouse sucked up leaves with his new Toro Leaf Blower-Vac. The old Craftsman has been held together by duct tape for a few years now, and the bag into which all the leaves get sucked is threadbare, with almost as many chopped up leaves blowing out of it as get sucked into it. It was time. The new machine is nice, more ergonomic, which means it's easier on The Spouse's back, and has a tougher bag, but it doesn't appear to chop the leaves as finely, despite packaging touting its 16:1 mulching ratio (16 bags of leaves is supposed to be chopped into one bag), and its metal impeller. We'll have to see if it was just wet leaves, or if it really isn't as good at mulching as the old one.
The birch tree on the south side of the driveway is amazing in the fall. The leaves turn a beautiful gold. It really is breathtaking, and I often find myself standing, staring at it, wishing I could do it justice in photos. This year, it dropped nearly all its leaves in one fell swoop. That's what The Spouse was sucking up on Saturday. I took a photo of the leaves with my phone - pretty dismal resolution, but it's what I had available at the time. This is about half as many leaves as had fallen by Saturday. You could NOT see the lawn or the curb by Saturday. The only leaves left on the tree were just a few hundred on the very bottom.
After the yardwork, we had dinner and vegged out on the couch and watched stuff we had TiVo'd.
Sunday we got up and went to breakfast with our daughter and the grandkids. Son-in-law is off hunting in Montana with my dad, so daughter and grandkids are all ours. After breakfast, they came over with pumpkins for carving. Daughter always puts those Mr. Potato Head type things in the pumpkins at their house, and the kids get a kick out of deciding with which nose, eyes, mouth, ears and whatnot their pumpkin will be adorned, but this year, granddaughter asked her mother if they could have a pumpkin with a candle in it "like everyone else". Daughter didn't want to carve the pumpkins they had decorated, so she decided to bring new pumpkins to our house so we could have a carving party. We had a ball! Grandpa did the honors, and we have two very nice traditional pumpkins, complete with votive candles, on our porch now - something we haven't had in, well, I don't remember the last time, it's been that long. One pumpkin is obviously a girl - she has lips. The other has the typical gap-toothed smile. The kids were delighted.
We baked pumpkin seeds, another first for the grandkids, and then watched Poseidon, Finding Neverland, and half of Shopgirl. We came into that one an hour into the movie, so we have no idea how relationships developed or anything - very disconcerting. We will have to find it and TiVo it so we can watch ALL of it someday. The kids liked Finding Neverland a lot. I have to say, Johnny Depp is a remarkable actor. I have always wanted to see that film, but never could get anyone to watch it with me. We stumbled across it, and the Scottish accent of J.M. Barrie drew us in. Before we knew it, we were all engrossed in the movie. It was really good. Poseidon was your typical disaster/action movie. Short on acting ability, long on drama. The sets were amazing, the outcome predictable. Grandson kept up a monologue throughout most of the movie, mostly to distract himself from the people being killed as they were flung about the boat while it overturned I think. At one point, he did say "I don't think I am going to like this movie". I can't recommend it, unless you are simply dying to see Richard Dreyfuss play an aging gay man bent on suicide until he sees The Wave coming, at which point he becomes a sort of hero/cheerleader/father figure. It's entertaining. That's the best I can say about it.
The hour grew late. Daughter, grandchildren, and granddog repaired to their own abode. The Cat came out from hiding (she loathes both granddog and grandchildren equally). We watched one more TiVo'd show, then off to bed for us. What a great, lazy day.
Now it's off to buy groceries.
