Storm and Company

Tuesday a.m.
It’s funny – sometimes I feel like writing and sometimes I just don’t – this has been one of them “just don’t” times. But really hasn’t been too much to say either.
We are experiencing winter like weather – about 20 to 15 degrees below normal. Down to freezing at night. Have to leave the heat on in Jennie to keep her warm enough.
The Driver noticed that there are “snow flurries” in the forecast for later in the week. He is more than ready to leave. We have set a date and even made reservations for the first nights campground. We’re waiting to leave until the 14th cause by then our house sitter will be back from his vacation in Mexico and settled in. That’s only two days later then we left the last two years. Planning on spending Thanksgiving in Vegas.
We got lucky with that bad storm that passed through the Midwest last week – the worst of it was north and south of us – it kind of just went around the hills. It rained really hard for about 20 minutes and the wind blew for a couple of days.

View of the storm

At the very beginning of it we lost one big branch off a tree in the woods behind us. Gave off a heck of a loud CRACK! and THUMP! Except for losing power for four hours that was it. While the power was out I was cooking…yep cooking. Had to light the stove with a match other than that all worked fine. I made empanadas – we’d had the dough in the freezer so wanted to use it up. Made about four dozen. Turned out pretty good. Froze a lot of them to take with us. More on the storm – as we’ve been out and about I have noticed a few barns with the roofs peeled back (metal ones) and some trees down – but all of that is in the low lands.
Not long after the storm passed through we got company. Beth, the lady who started the Women RV forum I am active in, came by for overnight.

Beth's RV

We met her before a couple of years ago in Texas. Last winter she and another lady spent boon docking in Baja. Anyway had a real nice but short visit. She was on her way to Kentucky where she is going to work at Amazon dot com for the couple of months before Christmas.
The storm finished the fall colors completely around here. In fact at one time during the windiest part of the day it looked like we were in the middle of a yellow blizzard so many leaves were flying through the air. Now we are left with nothing but brown grass, dead weeds and bare trees.

Looking out back

Not too pretty. Last weekend, even without the colors, the little town was wall to wall tourists. It’s kind of funny during the week one of the parking lots there displays a “$3 Parking” sign – on weekends it is $5 – and it was full.

Just driving through I saw three different corners with someone playing an instrument and singing.

This has been a bad year for the stores down there – the city in its mindless thinking decided to rip up the streets right downtown all summer long. No parking, no sidewalks – people didn’t know they could get to the stores in those areas. And the excessive heat didn’t help much either. The streets are nice now though – just in time for the freezing weather.

I’m a little disappointed with the nook system. The actual Nook itself is great – I’ve managed to read several books already. BUT… I think I mentioned that new hardcovers are a little cheaper than buying the actual book, but older paper backs are more expensive then buying them. One of there big advertising touts is the number of free books available. Well yes and no. Books you never heard of and don’t want to read anyway are free. But I downloaded a couple I thought I might like. One of them was 24 whole pages another only seven pages long….what is that? Call them short stories not books. Then some of them are just the first couple chapters of the real book. But nothing says that when you are looking at them to download. Kind of irritating, to me anyway. And then from the Nook itself you can’t delete them – but I found out by going online using the computer I can delete them. Eventually I’ll get it all figured out and I think it will work nicely while in Mexico.
I was looking in one of my cook books the other day and discovered a couple recipes for squirrel. Fricasseed squirrel no less. Nope I’m not going to try it. But I’ll send it to anyone who is interested. I did cook some chicken breasts in orange juice last night with onions and mushrooms - yummy
Just as a final thought – I’m so glad this is election day. So sick of e-mails and TV crap, oops I meant ads. Spell check wants me to capitalize election day but I don’t think it deserves it anymore.