Fall Memories

The brakes in our van have been making a squealing noise and if you have to brake suddenly the whole vehicle shudders and drags towards the right. It's a little bit scary. Turns out it was a warped rotor head (or some such thing). The doo-dad wasn't under warranty but the kind salesman said, "since you spent so much money last time, we'll comp this for you." Thank heavens for nice salesmen who remember our $963 purchases from last spring. I'm sure it was in his computer, but he was just so darned nice that I've convinced myself he was just being a helpful guy. To top it all off, the kids were pretty well behaved while we waited for the work to be done. Sam tried once to crawl through the line of tires displayed in the middle of the showroom floor, but I took his water gun away from him, and tapped on his rear, and he was good for the rest of the hour we waited. People actually came in and smiled at my children instead of looking pityingly at us. It's a first. Usually they make comments like, "Oh my, you are busy aren't you?" But today they just commented on what nice boys they were. I'm sure tomorrow we're in for some really strange occurance while out in public, but for today I'm just pleased with all 3 boys.

This afternoon we went to the little farm on the corner of Lake Lowell and Middleton roads. A couple of my friends decided we had to go to a pumpkin patch in order to purchase our Halloween pumpkins and let the kids have that whole experience. Luckily I talked the mother of the 1 1/2 year old little girl out of having the kids all dress in their costumes to choose pumpkins. I can only imagine how much extra time it would have taken to find all the doctor's instruments and fireman's accessories for Chris and Sam. Perhaps I'd like the idea of dressing up a little more if my kids didn't live in their dress up clothes at home 4 days out of 7 anyway. Chris and Sam loved getting to choose pumpkins and as a bonus we also bought a couple varieties of squash and a whole box of Honeycrisp apples. Actually, we bought 5 pounds of apples. After everyone was seated in the van, and the seat belts buckled, and Chris and Sam were eating their second apple... we didn't have many apples left. So, I bought a box. We could always use more fruit in our diets. I think we've all eaten about 4 apples each this evening. The apples only weigh about 1/2 pound a piece. I'm sure that must be good for us.

This evening's final observation: We have a ton of some sort of garden or crab spider. They're really neat orangish/pinkish/beigeish spiders that are about the size of a kumquat. They have two horned ridges on their abdomens that are a darker brown color and brown rings around the joints in their legs. They are very active at night and seem to love our Linden tree. We have a few with egg sacs along the edge of the roof. The egg sacks are the same odd color as the spiders. In the late evening they are always busy spinning their webs and seem to do a booming business catching flies and moths. By morning the webs are mostly gone, only a small bit right next to the spider remains. I love watching these spiders. They're nice normal spiders who stay in their webs and don't go galivanting about on the floor of the house scaring nice people. I hope they eat all the Tegenerias spiders lurking about the place.