Fall Beauty

This weekend we had some lovely fall weather -- was warm and sunny. Now we're back to cold and rainy, and the batteries on our thermostat died yesterday. I replaced them with some I'd recharged recently, and yet none of the recently charged batteries were working. Grr. I put twelve batteries in the charger, but in the meantime took to wearing a down vest in the house to keep warm. Thank goodness this morning the batteries I charged yesterday were ready, so I could get the furnace working again. For some reason, we can't run the furnace if the thermostat batteries die. Not a good thing. Think I'll suck it up and buy some nice Energizer batteries to put in the thermostat, rather than keep having the change the lame rechargeable batteries every week. And did I mention the battery holder on the thermostat is broken, so I have to try to hold the batteries in place, while angling the thermostat back into the holder on the wall? Fun. Oh. Where was I? Oh yes, warm and sunny.

Saturday, the boys and I went out to check for salmon at the creek at the end of our street. We only saw two. Hope there are more next year!

Sunday we went to the nearby "farm" for our annual fall tradition of going through the corn maze and buying a pumpkin. The "farm" is about 27 acres, so not too big, but they always have an acre corn maze and some nice pumpkins for sale, and it's only ten minutes from our house. The corn maze wasn't too high this year, but much more impressive than it was the first year we went, when there was a summer drought and the corn was only about three feet high. Not exactly a challenging maze that year! The maze has ten differently patterned hole punches hidden at various points, and if you find all ten and punch your card, you get a mini pumpkin at the end. So, of course, we had to find all of those. It was fun, though Harrison had some whiny moments. We all made it through, though, and picked out our mini pumpkins (the boys both wanted white ones) and then found a nice big pumpkin for carving.