Week in Review

The Weather: It is definitely Fall. Chilly in the morning, heat on in the car. Baking in the afternoon, car switched to AC. This is the time of year when I amass a pile of jackets at work, because I wear them in, but not out.

The leaves are changing, making for a pretty view en route to work:

And the deer and elk are getting back together into herds.

Even baby elk are cute!

Except for these two young ones, who have taken to hanging out on the school playground:

I think they are trying to figure out how to navigate sitting on the swings. Or maybe they are debating who gets to swing and who has to push. I would imagine once they fold themselves onto a swing, it would be hard for them to pump those skinny legs and get themselves going.

Of course, there was the one night it rained really hard...and then there came sleet...followed by snow. Not surprisingly, there was a rollover by 7AM. This is what the road looked like when I headed down at 9AM:

And, two days later, I didn't need a jacket again.

At Work: We are in the process of changing our juvenile fiction around. More on that later. We stopped for a couple days to get ready for our Halloween party (see Friday's post).

Still working out bugs with the new online catalog. They won't let me spray the computers with Raid. I really think that could only help.

Our cataloger/systems admin person has taken a new job, as director of a nearby library. Yeah for Steve! We'll have his old position open soon, so if you have experience in that area, let me know.

Oh, and don't forget, we have a Scholastic Book Fair starting the day after Thanksgiving break! That was a message for me, btw. Because I keep forgetting, and then it pops into my head attached to a "you need to do something about this" feeling, only to be replaced by other things I need to do something about.

Kids: M and I have spent most of the weekend cleaning her room. And by cleaning, I mean we took EVERYTHING out and put it in the living room.

See, all clean!

We took her old, falling-apart bed to the dump, and Daddy built her a very cool new platform bed. We are still in the process of putting everything back, under Mommy's very strict instructions. So far, the tally is:

5 large bags of trash

28 pairs of shoes

265 books (that's my girl!)

124 stray hangers

14 loads of laundry

I can't poke too much fun, because I know Grandma and Grandpa will be all too happy to describe the perpetual state of my room when I was younger.

Tonight, M and Daddy are on a date - her late birthday gift, tickets to a Martina McBride concert. Mommy is having a date night with C., S. and L., watching - sigh - Ghostbusters, and eating hot dogs and beans. We made cookies, too, and have been sampling them quite thoroughly.

Christopher is looking forward to Halloween tomorrow, and driving me absoluteky berserkers - we still don't quite have the whole how-many-days-until perspective down. He is dressing as Darth Vader (as seen in Friday's post). He has been a bit shy this year, and things with masks seem to make him feel more confident. When my brother and his girlfriend came to visit, he hid in his room for a while, then came out in his Ironman outfit. (Uncle Mike scored points by trying the helmet on himself!)

Last night we went to a Halloween party at our friends' house. No mud this time! Once again, C. took off and played hard all night, S. alternately entertained and tried to scare Daddy with her fearlessness, L. slept, and M., Daddy and I got to socialize with real, actual grown-ups! Favorite quote from the evening: "Does anybody know what street I live on?" (And no, the speaker was not intoxicated at the time. Hey, when you have a PO box for mail, it's like trying to remember your own phone number!)

I know there was more going on that this, but Halloween and The Great Room Cleaning of 2011 sort of eclipsed the rest of it. My goals for the next week: new carpet in the living room, start updating the photo albums, and get to the "D"s in the juvenile fiction. Tune in again next week, so you can laugh at my progress!