My Kind of Decor

I call it 'autumn harvest' rather than Halloween. We never have Trick or Treaters out here in the boonies at the top of our hill so Jack 'o lanterns and skeletons don't figure much. These are the pumpkins and squash we got at the Red Barn Store, supplemented by a few from Olivers. The beauty of this decor is that it will last through Thanksgiving, which is my favorite holiday,  but tends to get lost in the shuffle between Halloween and Christmas.

Every Monday morning we add a couple of minutes for our drive to Kathy's. We're up to 40 minutes now and still we were late due to incomprehensibly slow road works at a major intersections. Last week I had an appointment requiring traversing the same intersection just an hour later and there was no traffic at all so we are already planning our strategy for the future. I refuse to leave any earlier so we will just have to try a new route that doesn't take us past any schools....

The expected diagnosis of another squamous cell carcinoma on my other ankle came in today, so I have an appointment to have that excised in two weeks. The one I had done five weeks ago is still healing, though not at all painful anymore, so I didn't mind having a couple of weeks' respite for it to heal a bit more. 

Matt and the girls will be celebrating Thanksgiving in New York, but the rest of the family will be assembling for the family feast day. We invited John's niece Lindsay, her husband Adisa ant their two girls, (Grace, 7 and Sage, 6 months) and we're pleased that they will be joining us. It will be the first time we've seen them last Thanksgiving when Lindsay was just announcing that she was pregnant. We've also invited my brother and his wife, but it will be a bit of a juggling act for them, so we await developments....

Needless to say, Jim and Dana will be heavily involved in the festivities, and we may even have dinner at their house. 

It feels so frivolous to be thinking about feasting and family when there is killing and mayhem in the Middle East. Words fail me, but all I can do is write a letter begging Biden to keep trying to broker some sort of cease fire and not to keep supplying arms to either side. I don't think there is any chance that Israel will be able to 'wipe out Hamas in Gaza and everywhere else' and the human cost is already incomprehensibly high....