weather - Lord Gonchar

Mowing For Christmas

This is our third fall at this house. The last two years we cleaned up all the leaves (more or less) the first weekend of November. This year it rained…and rained some more…and then still more. Literally, every day we had a chance to get out and try to clean things up, it rained. Finally today it was sunny. It was 45. Sounds like leaf-raking weather.

My wife and daughter were on rake and removal. Little man had the shovel and wheelbarrow and did a great job going down the curb. I fired up the lawn mower and made a mess with a combo of its mulching ability, bagging capability and general ease of spitting leaves into the woods. Then I doubled over the entire yard – essentially mowing the week before Christmas.

It was still pretty wet. Leaves were packed and stuck. The yard was a mess, but we made an impact. It at least looks like we care now. It’s really only three months (probably less) until we need to start thinking about maintaining outside again. I hope we can get on top of it. That’s the one place I feel like we’ve let things go since we moved it. We started off strong that first spring/summer and then just petered out. It really needs some attention. I’d like to get some curb appeal going.

This Weekend

For the past few years, we’ve gotten a real tree for Christmas. Basically, since we moved to Ohio. They always suck. We vowed last year to pick up a nice artificial tree this year/ Ideally, we want a really tall one that we can put in the entry way. We kind of unofficially figured a 12-foot tree would be cool. Seems to be the point where the prices are still reasonable, but it’s tall enough to be something (I measured – the entry in 17 feet high). It’s about time we started finding one – and it turns out it’s not as easy as it seems to find a combo of reasonable cost and quality in a really tall artificial tree. But that’s for another post.

So to start thinking Xmas and maybe start scoping trees we decided to go check out our local Christmas Tree Shoppe. We knew a little about it and had been wanting to check the place out for a while. Well, our mistake for not looking into it more, but it’s probably the worst place in the world. I expected a cute little seasonal holiday-type place. It’s actually essentially a Big Lots with 1/4 of the store filled with seasonal holiday items of the Big Lots quality you’d expect. It fucking sucked. If it burned to the ground tomorrow, I’d chuckle with approval. I actually wished I were in a Big Lots. (for the record, Big Lots is one of my least favorite places on Earth)

Just a big fucking waste of time.

We noticed there was a Burlington Coat Factory in the plaza. We hadn’t been to one in ages, but we used to find pretty great deals at the one in Allentown when we lived there.

Mistake #2.

It smelled…mostly like sad. And there was absolutely nothing worth seeing there…except (and I swear we found these there) for the boys mustard yellow courduroy pants straight off the kids in early-70′s Sesame Street episodes. I had flashbacks.

We quickly slipped out of there and beelined to the other location we planned on hitting – Hobby Lobby. I don’t think I’d ever stepped foot in one prior to this. We saw an ad that said they had a buttload of trees in all shapes and sizes at great prices. It may have been a bit of an oversell. They had one 12-footer, but it didn’t look very real and was a bit bare…and even with the 50% off sale on all Christmas decorations, still came in at a price closer to four digits than two. Meh.

What a waste of a couple of Friday hours.

On Satuday, we had football equipment turn-ins in the morning, then my son and I decided to drive across town to see one of the semi-final tournament games. Looked to be possibly the best game of the entire tournament at the 4th grade level. One team was a sleeper that went undefeated and gave up just one touchdown in the 8-game season and only two TD’s in three tournament games. No one ever put up more than 6 against them. They were playing the team that has been a thorn in our side not just once, but twice in the past. They’re consistently good and passed us in the final week of the season for the highest scoring team in the 4th grade.

On paper it was the unstoppable force against the immovable object.

It didn’t play out that way. The sleeper team gave up 28 points. In one game they gave up more TD’s than they had total in the 11 games prior. We still had fun. Might go to the championship game at UD next weekend.

It was also my daughter’s birthday. I have a 14 year old. Her party was last weekend, so she got to spend the day alone while my wife was at work and my son and I were at the game. She got a cake from Ritters. She wanted a Mud Pie cake. Too chocolatey for me. A weird little quirk of mine is that I’m not fond of chocolate ice cream. Even worse, chocolate ice cream with more chocolate shit mixed in…and then topped with more chcocolate. Not my thing. But Ritters is awesome. It took us a while to discover them (we’re DQ people for childhood), but we haven’t been to DQ in ages. (for the record my very favorite ice cream is Whitehouse)

Tomorrow? Little stuff around the house and a Steelers game tomorrow night. Normally we rake/blow leaves the first weekend in November, but all the leaves haven’t fallen yet. Trees are still surprisingly full for this late in the year. Maybe next weekend.

I’m livin’ it.

November 6th, 2011 - food - football - fun - life - purchases - the kids - weather