Final Jeopardy answer is "leaves"

Which of the following doesn't belong with the other two, snow, snowblower, leaves?

So we couldn't even make it to end of October without a northeaster coming though. Depending where you measured we had a foot to a foot and a half of snow overnight. With the temperatures averaging well over the freezing mark the snow will be gone soon enough but any snow this time of year is little to just a little too much.

A bit early for snow pictures and me complaining
about it but hey, it's my blog.

The camper had to beat a hasty retreat to
winter storage a day earlier than I'd planned.

Sunny skies and cooler walking...

... a couple of the better things about this time of year, of course it comes with less daylight. Leaving for work usually a little after 6am is pitch black with clear skies or a morning like today with rain and fog leaves a lot to be desired. There will be a bit of relief in a couple of weeks when we set the clocks back and as I've lamented here before we reset the progression to A.M. darkness. Occasionally on my lunchtime strolls around downtown Portland I get a taste of my admiration for well constructed scaffolding and Monday's wanderings brought me upon a fine specimen of exterior skeletal order and stability on Park Street shown in the photo. I have no desire to clamber about the structure towering above the brick walkway though as a child jungle gyms provoked a fascination that I was seldom able to partake in so I admit there is some connection.

Assault on the attic

Now with the weather cooling down Carol and I are making a push at clearing out our attic which is over the garage, we also needed to reopen some space for the deck furniture and the screen room to be stored for the winter. In as we don't have a basement the attic was built as a full second floor, about 26 feet long and maybe 16 feet wide. There is plenty of room for a lot of stuff much of which we could get along without quite nicely thank you. How to make that stuff disappear is the real trick. So far we've managed to sort out most of it. Some goes to curbside trash and the recycling, trash that doesn't go that way needs to be trucked to the transfer station the next town over. Good stuff we don't need goes to the Salvation Army's store across town. This coming Saturday there's a electronics recycling drop off in another town nearby. What all this will gain us is space to figure out the next steps - what to do with what we keep and re-evaluate what else we can be rid of. All this sorting amounted to staging the various goods in one of the two bays of the garage - motivation to finish the job soon or I'll be clearing snow off the truck before going anywhere.

Sign of the season, close up the camp

Yeah, Columbus Day weekend, time to batten down the hatches at the camp. Not quite a nautical situation but things must be dealt with before the onset of winter. I accompanied Lois and Jim up to my mother-in-law's where we spent Friday and Saturday nights for a visit and then a couple of hours Saturday morning taking care of business at the lake. Jim drained the plumbing system added some RV anti-freeze to the pipes and retrieved the waterline from the lake with Lois and I carrying up the concrete blocks used to hold down the line on the lake bottom. Then the three of us lift the lower two ramp sections and stack them on the upper most ramp.

The weather this weekend was unusually warm, temperatures got into the 80s!


Here the ramps are stacked safely away from the shore.

While Jim worked on the pipes Lois and I brought in the folding picnic table and the swing seat then cleaned out the wood shed.

Buttoned up and ready for winter - more than I'll be!

Where would we be?

Steve Jobs, RIP October 5th, 2011

Back in 1988 I barely ever had my hands on computer that I could make do stuff. By the end of 1988 I was all over Apple's Macintosh SE and this 30 year old drafter became a graphic designer and hasn't looked back since. Granted by 1994 at work I was on a Microsoft Windows computer I was on my second Mac at home and eventually on a PC there as well but I always coveted getting back to a Mac and still may someday. Mac was struggling it's way through the mid 90s when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and had thereafter inspired the push to what many of our day-to-day devices have become. From computers to music players and smartphones their competitors have been pressed to keep up with the ideas and production of products conceived by Jobs and his prodigies.