Saturday, November 24, 2007

November Odds and Ends

It's been a while since I posted, so I have a number of odds and ends to share, most of them the former.

The first "end" to share is that Thanksgiving eve was the final end to this year's gardening season, with our first hard frost in Grand Rapids. Typically we see our first hard frost in late September, or October for sure. This year, we've been eating fresh garden lettuce, spinach, and chard right up to Thanksgiving.

Now for a few "odds." When I put on my jacket to go for a walk on Thanksgiving, there was this brown fuzzy mass stuck to the left lapel. Upon closer inspection, I realized it was a bat that had nuzzled down into the coat rack to get away from the light of day. So I slowly took off my jacket and took the old boy outside. We're not sure how he got in the house, but suspect Honey, our time-share cat, brought him in.

The second "odd" happened a week ago when we went to the Grand Rapids Thanksgiving parade. Actually, there were a lot of odd things about this parade, but the weirdest was the fact that the Grand Rapids Home for Veterans entered their short bus in the parade. Rather than having a bunch of veterans marching or on a float, down the street came a bland white van with windows tinted so dark you couldn't even see the people inside. Thankfully, one extroverted veteran in the back seat took the liberty of waiving out the window.

Lastly, Abbey and I finally got to do something tonight we've been talking about for a few weeks. We went ice skating. We had planned to go downtown (the mailer that came last week said they would be opening November 23 and it's been below freezing for the past three days), but there was no ice there. So tonight we went to Griff's Ice House for Abbey's first lesson. She did great, and is eager to go again. Afterwards, we watched a period of a high school hockey game. Hockey is tops on Abbey's list of spectator sports.