Frigid Late Fall

Our late fall this year has been dry and cold. One lake's all but dried up, so we do a lot of walks behind the house with the cats. Here's Sidney up a tree. Both the cats like climbing up trees. We're not sure whether it's a flight response (yes, we know of at least one instance where Sidney got treed by a neighbour's dog), or whether they do it to get a lay of the land. It seems to be the latter when we go out over the beaver pond to what I've started calling the land spit. There, out in the tall grasses, Sidney will often climb up a tree just to see where everyone else has gone. Or so it seems.

Christmas came a little early for us. We were both waiting for some packages and they arrived the same day. Corey got some coats and I got my Meinl 18" China cymbal that I bought back in Austin. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, other than at Strait Music where I bought it. I think that's the only way to buy cymbals now—have to hit them to test how they sound.

Last weekend, we went out on the sailboat, on the second lake around here that still has water in it. They've pretty much emptied one lake (Jocasee) to keep the second semi full of water (it needs to have water to cool the nuclear plant that's on it). Here I'm just hamming it up on the VHF radio that I bring with me on the boat. Since there was no wind, we were just motoring around to exercise the engine. We'll need to bring some 2-cycle oil next time since we used it all up. It's a two-stroke engine but it has its own oil reservoire; somewhat unusual. Maybe one of these years when it finally conks out we'll look into getting a quieter 4-stroke outboard. We just bought a 4-stroke leaf blower and it's much quieter than our older 2-stroke screamer.