Fall Camp

This weekend was our fall Pathfinder camp.

Do you know how hard it is to find a site to camp in tents in late October?  It's not terribly easy.

Luckily, I have a big backyard, so we decided to camp there. As an added bonus, I didn't have to pack.

Friday was beautiful. We set up the tents (one 6-person tent for 4 girls, one 6-person tent for the leaders, one dining tent), then walked over to the Sportsplex and went for a walk on the trails in the dark.  The girls kept freaking themselves out by inventing stories that murderers were lurking in the bushes, which resulted in screams whenever we encountered people doing nefarious things like walking their dogs.

It was late by the time we got to bed, so we slept in on Saturday morning.  After making our breakfast and cleaning up, we went door to door selling cookies.  We had lunch, and then it was time to get ready for the zombie walk.

Most of the girls did their own makeup, so we had wildly different zombie looks. (Well, three were zombies, one was a butterfly. I don't get it, but points to her for being her own person.) I went with these instructions. It turned out OK.

Note the sad lack of brain hair clips

If I were to dress up as a zombie again, I'd add more toilet paper and prob ably go with different colours over top. It lasted quite well, even on the drizzly day. I didn't actually put together a costume, simply because it was cold and rainy, and my costume options required better weather.

We took the bus downtown - getting the occasional strange look - and walked to the start of the walk.  There were tons of people there, dressed as every type of zombie you could imagine. I took some pictures, but ... my phone is across the room, so just use your imagination.

A little after 3:30, the walk started. It was long. Really, really long. And by the end, my feet hurt enough that I was actually walking like a zombie. If I were to do the walk again, I'd join the group on Elgin Street.

We made it to the Parliament buildings, but didn't stay there long because everyone was exhausted. We bused home and cooked our supper inside.

We woke this morning to more rain. I unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the rain to go away via twitter, but we had to take the tents down wet.  I now have tents drying all over the basement.

Still, it was a good weekend.  The girls hadn't had much camping experience, and they learned a lot. They even managed to remain mostly cheerful during some difficult weather.

But I plan to sleep for the rest of the day.

After I cook supper and do my laundry, that is.

Mmmm, brains

The Zombie Walk is fast approaching. I decided last week that I was going. I have no idea what my costume will be - I'm having issues destroying perfectly good clothes. I'm also having issues destroying some of my clothes, which, frankly, are getting to the point where they should not be worn in public.

But in the meantime, I've been googling makeup ideas. Man, there's some cool stuff out there. I'm torn between trying it all tonight and being too lazy to bother doing it in advance at all.

I also found hair clips with brain pieces on them - and by found, I mean "saw on the internet". For the record, they don't have such clips at Value Village, Dollarama, Malobar's, or Party City (formerly Party Packagers). Party City does have a skull cap that is topped with brains, but that's too fake for me - unlike brains on hair clips, which are totally natural.

Tomorrow is out for costume assembling - it's the last boxing class of the session - but maybe I'll find some time on Thursday to figure it out. If not, I'll be the one at the zombie walk in normal clothes & awesome makeup. Or possibly mediocre makeup.

Either way, I'll be there.

Get me out of here!

I worked from home on Friday.

I love the idea that I can work from home on occasion. It makes it easier when I have an appointment closer to home than work, or when I take my car in, or when someone's coming to the house for some reason.

It's also good when I have personal phone calls to make - I can make them from work, but it's more convenient to make them from home.  On Friday, for example, I scheduled the removal of the annoying cyst on my back.

There are some issues with working from home, though.

First of all, I quickly run out of food in the house, because I snack constantly. On Friday morning, I finished all of the veggies in the raw veggie container in the fridge before 9:30. I would have moved on to potato chips, but we didn't have any.

Also, I miss everything that's going on at work - including the gym, and our newest activity of going out for lunch on Fridays.

And I notice things around the house - the kitchen floor needs sweeping, for example - but I shouldn't be doing anything about them because I'm supposed to be working. But I can't work, because the kitchen floor is dirty.

I don't have a comfortable place to work at home - on Friday, I sat at the table and worked, but I was pretty sore by the end of the day. (I don't know why I didn't move earlier.)

But the biggest issue with working from home - especially on days I don't have a car - is that I go stir crazy. I think things like "I know, I'll just run to the store at lunch" - and then I realize I'll have to literally run, because my car is elsewhere.  If I were at work, I'd never run to the store at lunch, but something about being at home makes me want to be elsewhere.

If you've ever tried to convince me to leave my house outside of work hours, I'm sure that's shocking to you.

The thing is, I don't think it has anything to do with wanting human contact - I had three conference calls before noon. I think it's more about not being able to leave.

(That's ridiculous, of course - I'm a 10 minute walk from the transitway, so even without a car I can easily get where I'm going. In fact, I took the bus to pick up my car on Friday.  It took 35 minutes, including 15 minutes of walking.)

I don't think there's much danger that I'll start to work from home every day.
 

Harvest

I pulled out my garden this weekend.  I picked the cabbage and (2) potatoes yesterday. There were 2 large cabbages and 1 small one, and the fridge is pretty full of Thanksgiving stuff. I fit one of the large cabbages into the fridge but was concerned about whether the second one would be OK overnight.

And then I realized I picked it from outside, which was not refrigerated.

(Today I made part of the second one into coleslaw & put the rest in the raw veggies container that's always in the fridge.)

Today was the harder part - not physically harder, emotionally harder. I had to kill perfectly healthy tomatoes.

Here's a picture of the last one I pulled out. It's a grape tomato plant.  The first tomato was ripe in June, which is a month earlier than usual.  The spiral that's supporting it is about 5 feet tall (a little shorter when it's in the ground), and the top of the plant snapped and bent over because it was about a foot taller than the stake.

Yes, that's a full size outdoor garbage can

 I also had to pull out a huge volunteer tomato plant that (since it wasn't supported) was as wide as one of the raised garden beds.

And the only cucumber plant that grew, that produced its first flower a couple of weeks ago. (No cucumbers, just the one flower.)

From the one grape tomato plant, I got 1/2 a gallon of grape tomatoes - and that's with eating a few a day since June.

And, in convenient timing, tonight it's supposed to freeze.