Clean-up, Clean-up, Everybody Do Your Share

(Is it bad to start your Monday mornings off with a song by the big purple dinosaur that you'll now have running relentlessly through your head? Sorry.)

I love fall clean-up. Well, I don't love the actual cleaning part of it - it felt like we bagged somewhere around 89 bags of leaves yesterday. But I do love that feeling of "battening down the hatches" because winter's coming. I always think of Ma Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie, stockpiling her root veggies and making preserves and hanging hams from the ceiling in order to get ready for winter's isolation. (And I always wondered - doesn't it smell to have hams hanging from the ceiling?)

Fortunately, there's little actual clean-up for us to do as we have no garden and a postage-stamp-sized lawn; once the leaves are done, we're pretty much good to go. And then we can turn our thoughts to that all-important fall task: carving pumpkins.

This is about as close as she actually got to touching the inside.

(No, there's nothing wrong with his eyes. He's just in that "fake smile" stage where kids don't seem to realize that the idea is to look realistic when someone says "say cheese!")

The Husband's labour of love.

Yesterday was one of those beautiful fall days where the air is a bit crisp but still warm and the sky is that rich blue one only sees in October. We took a scenic walk around downtown:

Stone Arch Bridge

Taking a break from throwing stones.

In the "hmm, that's odd" category for the day, there was a knock at my door right after I returned from dropping The Girl off at school. A man showed me a very official-looking badge and explained he was doing a background check on my next-door neighbour and wanted to ask me some questions about her. I got off easy with my patented "I just moved here" excuse, so he continued down the street, presumably looking for juicier stories. Which begs all sorts of questions: for what purpose does he want this information? Was his badge legit? (If it wasn't, then his Dockers certainly bespoke bureaucratic officialdom.) What sort of things has my neighbour been up to? Is the blue minivan intended to blend in or are there departmental budgetary constraints that provoke all sorts of frustration?

So many questions.