Catching up with November

Oh dear. How do I always lose time? To catch up here are a few things which we especially enjoyed in the early part of November. 

Nov.1: Indoors or outdoors, we have always something growing or blooming which makes us happy. This is the new camellia in front of the bay window. It's a fall bloomer. 

Nov.5 - a Saturday: I helped out because Wade was gone, Sarah took the twins to a birthday party and Caleb should not be alone. He helped me working on the Chrismon for this year cutting wire. Great help! The weather was so nice (warm) that we could be on the back porch. 

Caleb spied this bird swooping in and I am quite proud of this photo.

Same day at home I checked on my hydrangeas and look what I found!

Freddie was back!

No school on Monday November 7. Sarah had taken the day off and asked us whether we wanted to join her with the kids on a hike. It was a beautiful Fall day. See the short sleeves and shorts? We could not pass it up. We met at the Powhatan State Park.  

The boys are excellent hikers. Never complain but of course they are interested in a lot of things .... like collecting kindling for their fireplace at home .... 

... and grasshoppers you always see on this path (sorry, no photos).

I think we finally wore Cooper down a little.

The weather stayed nice for quite a while. On the 10th we decided that we needed to do our walk outside of our community and drove to Meadow Farms. 

We ended the walk coming out of the woods at the lake and walked around. We walked onto the platform and there were two anglers who talked with us. We chatted with them and they told us the fishes were not biting. 

The older one told us that he had come here when he was a kid with lots of friends. They were supposed to have fishing licenses but only some did. Sometimes the police would come to check. He told us that as soon as he saw them he would start running, all the others too and the police behind them. When he was caught he would show that he had the license. The policeman (huffing and puffing) would ask “then why did you let me chase you?”. The policeman was not happy about it.

We walked away and when I turned around there they had just had caught one. 

The next day the weather had turned and it wasn't so nice any longer. It rained. We thought there was a break in the clouds and we wanted to walk in the community. The colorful leaves everywhere were quite beautiful.

James saw this little guy at the edge of the road. A snapping turtle. I don't want to meet him (or her) when its a big one. They can be very mean.

Ups, we were not fast enough. The next cloud got us. It was warm and fun though. My shoes and pants were wet as could be though.

Next day at our walk we saw that our old heron was back in our storm water catch basin. A bit ruff looking. What happened?

And finally, the week of November 14 to 18 was when our building got the new roof. It was the last building built in the CrossRidge Townes so it was the last to have that turn. It was not much bother. We could not use our garage or back porch but in a few days everything was back to normal.

This is it for now. Next blog will be: a birthday!