Fall Adventures and a Lunar Eclipse

We’ve been enjoying some beautiful weather this last week . . . enough for a visit to the local dairy for ice cream one evening.

The ice cream was good . . . but the smell in the yard was enough to knock you over!!

 

Last week we went on another campus visit with Bryce – to Eastern Michigan University.  They have a nice program, and we gained some valuable information about Athletic Training and Physical Therapy degrees, but he’s still got his heart set on Michigan State.

After our campus visit, we went to our favorite apple orchard to pick apples and get their excellent donuts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YUM!  The apples are crunchy and delicious . . . and the donuts . . . they were AMAZING, as usual!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to working around the campground, Bryce and Tom, along with my brother, Donnie, cleaned up my Mom’s hard – they trimmed trees and bushes, burned all the branches,

and Bryce mowed her grass.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This weekend, Bryce was lucky enough to get tickets to the MSU football game, so he drove out to East Lansing with a friend, and Tom and I hung out with his brother.

The guys watched the football games, and I worked on Bryce’s quilt.

It’s looking pretty good, I think!

On the way home, we got a good glimpse of the full moon leading up to Sunday’s Lunar Eclipse.

It was pretty cloudy on Sunday, but I was hoping for some good pictures of the eclipse.  I managed to get a few small windows of opportunity.

The beginning of the eclipse

Then it clouded up, so my next opportunity was just as the eclipse was almost complete.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More clouds, and then I was finally able to get a shot of the red moon – it’s a little blurry, though . . . I was having trouble keeping my camera steady enough for these long exposure shots!

It was pretty cool, and I’m glad the clouds cleared occasionally so we could see it!

Tomorrow my little pumpkin turns 17!  Happy Birthday Bryce!

Halloween Parties

As is often the case in Michigan, winter arrived along with Halloween . . . we had windy, COLD, weather . . . and even a few snow flurries . . . although not as much snow as they got in the Smokey Mountains!

We went to my sister’s house for Halloween to pass out candy to all the little kiddies in their neighborhood . . . but there weren’t too many kids out trick-or-treating!  The rain and cold kept most of them inside, I guess . . . can’t say that I blame their parents . . . I sure wouldn’t have wanted to be out in that!

On Saturday, the campground had a big Halloween Party for everyone in the park and surrounding area.  With the cold weather, the guys spent much of the day enclosing the pavillion to keep the wind out.

Tom and the boys had cut down several dead trees earlier in the week to stockpile enough wood for a good bonfire.

Unfortunately, they all ended up with a nasty case of poison ivy from those trees, and as usual, Nicolas got the worst of it!  With his ship date coming up very soon, we need to get this cleared up quickly, so I called the doctor to get him a prescription for steroids to battle the rash.  He’s not quite out of the woods yet, but he’s getting there!

We joined the crowd at the party,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and soon it was time to line up for dinner.  There was tons of food,

and they even had a DJ playing music.

We stayed long enough for dinner . . . which was excellent . . . but then we left.  There were lots of activities planned for the evening, and they partied until almost midnight, but we had another party to go to.

Saturday was also the date of my brother-in-law, Charlie’s, annual bonfire.  They are just a few short miles down the road from the campground, so we headed down there after dinner.  We got there just in time to see the fire go up!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Debbie got Tom to stand in front of it for size reference . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

. . . nobody else was getting that close!!

As cold as it was that night, it was a beautiful night around the fire!

Fall cleanup and football

By this time last year, we had left Michigan for the warmer weather in the southwest . . . but this year, we’ll be around a little bit longer.  Nicolas has a few more weeks until he “ships out”, so we’ll stick around until he’s gone.  Then we’ll make a beeline for Florida!

We had frost a few mornings this past week, but for the most part, the weather hasn’t been too bad.  The guys have been keeping busy with fall cleanup in the campground, and thankfully this week we had a few dry days and they were able to make a pretty good dent in the leaves.

 

They’ve worked enough hours to pay for our site for October and November, and electric for September, October and November . . . now they’re working toward next year (or a refund of September’s site rent, if I get my way).

 

There are still some trees with leaves on them, and some of the areas they clear end up covered again a day later . . . including our site!  For the most part, though, it’s looking pretty good around here!

 

Bryce has quickly mastered the art of driving a stick shift, as he loads up the Ranger with leaves and drives to to the back of the campground to dump them.

When I got home from work on Thursday, they had been hard at work since noon . . . and they kept at it until almost 7pm!  Bryce was feeling pretty tired . . .

and Friday they were back at it again, although I made them stop at 5:00, so we could have dinner at a more reasonable hour.

The boys did find time this week to carve their pumpkins . . .

(Can you guess which one is Bryce’s?) . . . and last night we picked up lights to go in them.

Bryce wants to wrap his light in green tissue paper so his pumpkin glows green!    

 

Casey got a new light for her collar, too, and when I took her picture, it was at the perfect angle to make her look like Rudolph!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a Millenicom customer for the last two years, we were shocked like everybody else to abruptly receive an email stating that our account has been acquired by Verizon, and we’re still waiting to see what that means for us.  We have our phones on Straight Talk (2 using Verizon and 1 using AT&T), and we aren’t really anxious to jump back onto the Verizon bandwagon for internet.

We’ve got very good wifi at this campground (better than we were getting with Millenicom), and the RV Park we’re going to be at in Florida for the winter provides hard-wired internet to the site, so I think we’re just going to let our internet service lapse until Spring.  Then we can assess what’s available and decide which way to go.

Last night I finished scanning my albums of Nick & Bryce’s baby pictures.  It was a pretty simple process with my new Brother DS-620 portable scanner.  It works really well with pictures . . . I just group photos by month, and continuously feed them into the scanner.  The program automatically saves each one to the designated folder with the file name I select, with a three-digit number added to the end of the filename (image 001, image002 . . . ).  It takes about 8 seconds per photo.

This was my Throwback Thursday photo this week . . . it seemed appropriate with today’s football game!

Bryce didn’t look too happy with that T-shirt we had on him!

Today is the big rivalry game between Michigan State and the University of Michigan.

We made Spartan jello to taunt the U of M fans in the family!

The game is almost over, and MSU has a huge lead, so I guess Bryce is going to be the happy one in the family!

Visiting the Pumpkin Patch

Last year, Nicolas was upset that he never got a pumpkin for Halloween, so he was determined to get one this year.  Sunday was a nice day, so after picking up Grandma to go out to my sister’s house, we stopped on the way at a local Pumpkin Patch.

There were lots of wagons full of pumpkins to choose from, but the boys wanted to pick their own, so we headed out into the pumpkin patch.

We left Grandma in the donut barn to wait for us while the guys searched for the perfect pumpkins.

Bryce has a design in his head already, so he carefully studied each pumpkin to see if it would fit.

While they searched, I took some nice fall pictures.

Soon they had looked at enough, and settled on their perfect pumpkins.

Tom even found one for us to carve!

We probably should have brought a wagon into the patch!  Oh well, the boys are strong, and they carried all three pumpkins back to the donut barn where Grandma was waiting with donuts and cider.

From the pumpkin patch, we continued to my sister’s house where we met up with another sister & brother-in-law, and my brother to go to their church’s Fall Festival.  We had a delicious turkey and roast beef dinner, bought some chances on gift baskets, and played a few games of bingo . . . Nicolas won $2, and Danny won $1.50 . . . OK, not real big prizes!

On the way out, we stopped for a photo-op with Pope Francis.

Back at Tina’s house, the boys got to play cards for awhile, and we all enjoyed the apple pie that Donnie made . . . although we barely had room for it after that dinner!