Freezing!

Hi, everyone!

Now that our temperatures are mostly below freezing, it’s hard to think back to the beginning of the month.  We had a lot of days with temperatures in the 60s and 70s! We didn’t need to bundle up to be outside!  The leaves were still falling in Fairport, but it was nice weather to get outside and clean them up!  The town hasn’t been around to pick up my leaf pile, so it is getting bigger and bigger!

At the bay, the leaves were mostly down by the weekend before Election Day.  I helped clean some of the last ones up!  My enkianthus friend by the kitchen window still had pretty color.

We went back to Fairport on Monday.  We were out of chocolate chip cookies, so Grandma and Grandpa made a big batch that evening.  I helped stir the dough and put it on the cookie sheets to bake.  Then I made sure all the cookies stayed on the cooling rack after they were baked.  Most of the cookies went into the freezer, but I made sure to taste test one.  It was yummy!

Before the pandemic, Grandma and I would have been baking at church for the Election Day bake sale on that Monday and the next day.  The church doesn’t have a bake sale any more, but Grandma and I baked some of the recipes at home.  We made one batch of sweet roll dough for cinnamon rolls and one batch of chocolate bread dough.  Grandma knew some of our church friends really wanted to keep their personal bake sale purchase memories alive.  I got to see some of my church friends when they came by to pick up some rolls or bread!  The choir got the rest of the treats at Wednesday rehearsal.

Wednesday, there were more leaves down and more good weather for raking them.  I thought my leaf pile was big before, but it got even bigger!

Friday was Veterans Day, and that was a school holiday for James and Thomas and Aunt Kara.  Grandma and I took them all to the Strong Museum of Play!  It was a busy day at the Strong!  The cast of the City Ballet company production of The Nutcracker were there to read for story hour, so I made some new friends!

While Grandma and I were getting our new membership cards at the office, Uncle Steven’s family went right on to the High Ropes course.  They were the first family on the course when it opened!  James and Thomas and Uncle Steven had been there before, but it was a new experience for Aunt Kara!

Of course, Thomas headed directly for the zipline!  Everybody in the family did that at least once!  After more people got onto the course, James and Thomas had to wait in line to get another turn!

Grandma and I watched while Uncle Steven’s family spent about 45 minutes on the ropes course.  They covered every possible path on both levels!  Then we had lunch at the Bill Gray’s diner just under the rope course.  Because it was Veterans Day, Uncle Steven got his lunch for free!

After lunch, everybody spent time at a new attraction close to the ropes course.  It’s a virtual aquarium!  You can color a provided fish outline any way you want, then scan it at a machine near the wall.  Your fish pops out of a virtual pipe and swims around for a few minutes before it disappears.  Thomas made a lot of fish.  James took more time designing each of his, but they both had lots of fun watching their fish appear!

While James and Thomas were at the virtual aquarium, I visited some of my old Strong Museum friends to say hello!

Partway through a visit to the Strong, James and Thomas like to take a break by playing Journey.  While Thomas was playing, James and I had a couple of games of 3-D tic tac toe.  Then James called up another video game on the console next to the Journey setup.

Veterans Day weekend is also when new toys are added to the Strong Museum Toy Hall of Fame.  I went upstairs to see what was new!

The Toy Hall of Fame is right next to the arcade game collection.  Someone gave James a handful of game tokens, so he had a chance to play the paid games!  Then he and Thomas found some other children to play video dodgeball.  They were pretty tired from jumping and running when we went home!

It was raining when we left the Strong Museum, and that marked a change in the weather.  Since then, it’s been colder, with rain showers and a bit of snow mixed in.  It’s a good thing we had inside projects to do!  Grandpa decided that we should get a new kitchen hood to connect to the replacement roof-mounted exhaust fan installed with the new roof.  He adapted a hood that had an exhaust fan already mounted in it.  Then he removed the old kitchen hood.  Grandma and Grandpa couldn’t remember whether that one was part of the 1976 remodeling of the kitchen or even older!  The duct from the hood to the roof came down with it.  Grandpa had to attach that duct to the new hood and extend the existing wiring to the other side of the hood.  Then Grandma and I helped him hoist the duct and new hood into place!  After that, Grandma repainted the wall before the oven went back into place.

Grandma needed to make a new batch of date ketchup, but she wanted to wait until the exhaust fan was working again!  I helped her cut up the red onions and dates.  Then I made sure the that the steam and cooking odors were going up the duct above the new hood!

We started getting light coatings of snow about a week ago.  At first, my impatiens friends in the window box were close enough to the house to survive the cold nights.  Then it got cold enough to freeze some of them, and finally all of them.  Meanwhile, a very big snowstorm 75 miles west of us is making national news!  Grandma went to the last Fairport Farmers Market of the season and bought a whole stalk of Brussels sprouts.  Uncle Steven’s family took half the stalk, and I helped Grandma cut some Brussels sprouts off what was left.

Today it’s sunny and windy and I can see the grass!  The gutter crew came to install a new, bigger, gutter across the main section of the back roof.  That was fun to watch!  They have a machine in their truck that shapes a long roll of metal into the proper shape.  Once the gutter was created, the installers carried it around to the back yard and installed it.  Now the new roof is complete!

Love,

Lion-san