Tales from the Love Shaque: Parting is such sweet sorrow!

So yeah. My beloved holiday, Halloween, is over.

I didn't plan well and it took 2 solid days to put stuff away instead of the 6 1/2 hours it took Randy & I last year. My mistake was that I tried to fill up totes & rearrange the garage instead of just dealing with the cemetery. But he wanted to run some wire in the garage while the skeletons were out of the way and that meant moving ALL the holiday totes, too. Then Sunday I was de-cemetery-ing while he installed a new garage door opener, so I was pretty much on my own.

Then Monday was spent rolling extension cords & cleaning mouse destruction from the shed & putting the totes away, etc, etc, etc.

But finally.....

the evidence was removed. This was actually Sunday evening. I haven't touched the lawn yet, but look! At that time there were no leaves to rake! There's a light layer out there now.

I kept hearing a weird sound that I thought was someone power washing their house, but it was a hot air balloon! I haven't seen one of these in years!

We had a casualty. He was in bad shape before, but he fell apart before even getting into the cemetery. After laughing at this, I had an idea to use this broken skeleton, so I retrieved the top half of him. Randy chucked the old garage door opener on his legs, so they're goners.

This is where the skeletons go in the off season.

They just hang out!

I also switched out the blowmolds - I put the H'ween guys in the shed and left the Christmas ones out so I could clean them up. Then they'll wait patiently in the garage until after Thanksgiving.

Randy was watching TV last night and heard scratching on the screen - which is pretty creepy since nothing could easily reach the screen! Even one of the cats was staring!

I hope this video works!

But the inside? Still looks like a Hallownado struck. Even tho all the totes are labelled for ease of rounding up items to pack away, there still seems like a whole lot of stuff still floating around. I don't get it. I'm going to have to buy another tote or two.

I don't normally get all political and I still won't. We all went to vote last night and with a clear conscience, voted third party. We knew it was highly unlikely that our candidate would win, but we put our opinions out there. Who knows? Trump may (fingers crossed) or may not, end up being an awesome president. We won't know unless we give him a chance. We will deal with it and hope for the best. No *one* candidate is going to make all people happy, so I don't get why all these protests are happening all over. Suck it up people! And I confess to having a rousing discussion with Randy about the merits of snowplows and the pros & cons of the shape of the front end of each of our cars......

We watched (Ok - Randy watched, I fell asleep) the election coverage on the CBC. The Canadians are a lot more interesting with their news than the biased US stations. I learned a lot more from them about how it all works.

That being said, Miss Angela was pretty funny with it came to voting. She's only voted so far in the local election earlier this summer, so this was a big thing to her. I stopped by to get her after work and she told me she didn't know about going to vote because it was so confusing! I had a sample ballot to look at and we chatted about it. She thought she had to do every single section, all of the Supreme Court Justices & UofM regents & MSU trustees & school board, etc! She was relieved when I told her she didn't have to. I told her at the very minimum chose her president and look at the township sections and the local proposals. We got to our polling place a little after 4 and walked right in. She was at a booth right next to mine, so I was able to help her out.

I had to make a trip to the dance studio tonight (and got the guilt trip about having not done Zumba since before my surgery in July!) Costume deposits were due and it was nice popping in to say hi and catch up on the gossip. Also found out some stuff that was not communicated very well to those of us who aren't there every day anymore. Since there aren't that many older girls anymore and the large group of middle-aged girls (around 11-13) is combined with them, the ballet teacher is offering pointe again. They did it 2 years ago and there were only 4 girls in the class. Thankfully, Angel's feet stopped growing when she was like 13, so her pointe shoes still fit. It was just a question whether they were still "good".

I got a peek at the props for the production number, too. They're doing a medley of songs based on the board game Clue. The big girls are the main characters (Angel is Miss Peacock), the next younger ones are the weapons (for example, Alayna gets to dance with a wrench), then the littlest ones are maids & stuff like that. Angel was telling us about being concerned doing a back-walkover on the dining room table while it's being pushed across the stage. I got the impression she refused, but they were telling me tonight that she did it just fine! Apparently all the girls are a wee bit afraid of that table, it's not the sturdiest creation ever!