Another cold front came marching upon us, but we had to endure the warmth before it. Thankfully it was just 70s instead of the dreadful 90s we had until October 2. The rain that came with it, having crept northward from the Gulf of Mexico (again!), started late Tuesday afternoon, proceeded through Wednesday, when it drizzled, poured, rained, misted, poured, dribbled, poured, and dribbled again—but stayed warm. On Thursday morning we lucked out and got a break in the rain, so we dashed to Sam's Club for a couple of things. We frankly had to dash inside the store, too, because there was only one electric cart free up front and it was rapidly running out of battery. So we picked up what we needed—including, ironically, batteries—and left posthaste, only to have the cart run out of juice inside the front door. Thankfully we only had a few things and we could just carry them to the car.

On the way home we stopped for the twofers at Publix. Like Sam's, they were doing a booming business in giant bags of candy for trick or treating tonight, and many of the employees as well as the shoppers were in costume. (At Sam's we had seen someone in a keen 1950s outfit, complete with full poodle skirt!) Now, when we went into the store, the clouds were lowering and it was still quite warm, about 74℉. In fact, it seemed warmer than when we left Sam's minutes before. We emerged from Publix about 45 minutes later with the rain just starting, and as we turned to drive through downtown Smyrna, it started to pour. By the time we got to the house, it was down to 62. The temperature continued to fall throughout the day, so that it was in the 50s during the news, 40s as we were watching TV, and it went down to the 30s during the night.

After the groceries were put up and lunch eaten, we went to tackle the last big thing before free electronics recycling day on Saturday: the clear plastic computer box in the garage. Back in "the old days," when it was cheaper, James used to build our computers instead of us buying them. We'd pick out a case, a motherboard, RAM, and the parts, and he'd put them together and we'd have a frankenmachine. Well, when these computers broke down we'd toss the broken parts and keep the working parts. These parts were all in the big plastic box in the closet in our garage. Some of the stuff was over ten years old. I pulled it out, James regarded it, and the junk went in a garbage bag. We pretty much threw out almost everything, especially all those phone cables (we had more phone cables than any two human beings should have). We kept a spare keyboard, a spare wired mouse, two power supplies (one never opened), one of each kind of cable, about three network cables of different lengths, and that was about it. James also cleaned out next to his computer and got rid of floppy disks (which I thought we had sacked long ago), games he bought and played briefly, games he bought and discovered he needed something expensive to play them, etc. We had two garbage bags full of junk just from that and a small cardboard box besides the dead fans, lamps, etc. in the garage boxes, and the two little netbooks that we had reformatted. (I did a Marie Kondo with the latter, and gave them a hug and told them how much joy they'd given us before I dumped them in the box.)

I was wandering around YouTube later on, and found some shows I had marked to watch later. These were produced by the Rhode Island PBS station profiling various towns in the state. I watched one about Johnston and was happy to see that, besides the town landfill, which has always been kind of a joke, they had a lot of stories about historic areas (including a history museum that opened after I left the state) and organic farms. The final story was about something I saw flitting around Facebook for months: three wild turkeys who were wandering around Atwood Avenue (practically Johnston's Main Street) without a care in the world, stopping traffic. They caught two, but the third one was at large for months after this was filmed. Not sure if they caught it or not!

We didn't do Hallowe'en, and as far as I can tell, maybe two houses on our street did. Usually you can hear kids outside, but I didn't see any when I looked out the window.

We awoke to a cold but beautiful Friday, with bright blue skies overhead. From shirtsleeves on Thursday, we were in jackets with flannel shirts underneath and hats.

Today we had an early lunch because of James' (and I think Ken's) doctors' appointments at Kaiser Glenlake. We went to Shane's barbecue with just Alice and Ken and missed a larger crowd, but had a good time chatting.

It's a good thing we mellowed out because once we arrived at Kaiser, it seemed to take forever. We got there so early James took his time using the rest room and I refilled all our water bottles while he did, so we were hoping we might get in early and out before rush-hour traffic began. We didn't get to his appointment until a hour after our scheduled time, but there was good news: the bandages were taken off and everything was dry, so she didn't put more back on. But we were so late getting out that we just went directly home. That suited me, because I put away the autumn decorations and put up the Thanksgiving decorations on the porch (and also the mailbox cover).

After last week's Hallowe'en Hawaii Five-0, this week's seemed kind of a letdown with those two idiot bloggers or whatever they were covering the team.

Saturday we were up with the sun (literally, because it was the final day of daylight saving time—and good riddance!—and the sun isn't up until after seven) for breakfast and dog walking before we had to load up the truck and head for Jim Miller Park for recycling day. It was chilly but sunny when we loaded up the power chair, but we weren't even a couple of miles from home when we ran into a bank of fog that we wove in and out of all the way to the park. At times it formed a wall of grey in front of us, then shredded apart once we got in line to leave our junk behind. From there we were planning to go to Harbor Freight and, accordingly, went the shortest way, past downtown Marietta, but they were having, in addition to the usual Farmer's Market, a Heart Run, and some local performers. We could hear one of them singing as we came around Glover Park. James had to thread his way around that, leaving us to head to Kennesaw by way of US-41, where we continued in and out of the fog banks, slipping in and out of the grey curtains ahead of us.

By the time we reached Harbor Freight, it was sunny again. We had a nice browse inside; I love hardware stores! I found some new gardening gloves at a very reasonable price, a few other things, and bought James an anniversary gift: he needed a new mototool. The store was in the same shopping center with a Publix, and we nipped inside to see if they had what we couldn't find in the Smyrna store on Thursday, paper towels (yes) and yogurt (no). By the time this was done, the fog was gone for good and the sky was a brilliant blue.

Then it was time for a little fun, so we stopped at Barnes&Noble. I picked up the new "Just Cross Stitch," and also two Christmas magazines. James also picked up a couple of magazines, and we were in a mellow mood when we stopped for lunch at Panera. Our last chore for the day was stopping at Sam's Club to fill up the truck.

And with this nice day our weekend ended.

Labels: books, decluttering, decorations, food, Hallowe'en, health, holidays, magazines, shopping, weather

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