More Autumnal Scenes

Arrr, 'tis Hallowe'en, maties!

This year the plan was that Emily, Ave and Frederick would all be pirates. I designed Frederick's costume to resemble Hugh Grant's role as The Pirate Captain in the movie, The Pirates!: Band of Misfits, complete with Polly the Dodo. Here is his costume, ready to go to school:

Apparently, though, Ava bailed on the Pirate plan Halloween morning and decided to be a cat, instead.  Pirates ships have cats, I am sure.

Emily is Captain Hook.

Note Frederick's face paint beard.  I made Frederick a thick and luxuriant beard but he wanted face paint instead.  Not nearly as luxuriant but much easier to wear, I am sure.

Here is Pirate Brown Beard wrestling an evil crocodile.

Frederick really, really loved having a beard.

Autumnal Scenes

The Changing Face of Flint

All kinds of construction going on around town.

 This is where there used to be a parking lot next to the Flint Institute of Music.

 This is off Davison Road just before you get to For-Mar.  It used to be just wild undeveloped land - looked a lot like For-Mar, actually.  It enrages me that they raze all that to build more factories when there are acres and acres of already blighted land within Flint.

This is taken from Franklin just across Robert T. Longway from our house.  I have no idea why they've thinned out the trees just leaving a row between Longway and this.  Bike path?  Giant water pipe?

Sleep stuff

So I've been having trouble sleeping.  Not usually falling asleep (although occasionally that too) but waking up in the middle of the night and then only getting fitful sleep until I finally can't take it any more and wake up very unrefreshed and peevish.  And now the entire culture is awash with stories about how a good eight hours is ABSOLUTELY VITAL and you will go SENILE in NO TIME AT ALL if you don't get it.  So I'm panicking a little (especially as I'm not sure if my inability to remember the name of That Actor in That Thing We Watched, You Know The One is incipient dementia or just a normal part of the aging process) (Stephen King says the most horrific film he's seen in recent years was Iris, because of how it begins with her forgetting the name for trees.) and so I signed up for another sleep study. Regular readers might remember that I've done this before, and the result of that was getting my tonsils and uvula surgically removed to fix mild apnea.  The sleep doctor thinks that my waking up might be the apnea again, and this time just from general looseness of the flesh from aging (isn't it fun?) because if your throat closes at 3 in the morning your body jacks you full of adrenaline to wake you up and it's understandably hard to fall back asleep again.  Worth a shot to check because apparently you can get a little mouthguard thingie that gives you an underbite while you sleep which apparently moves your tongue forward enough that no airpipe blockage is possible.  Ah, the indignities of one's dotage.  So last night (Friday) I showed up at 9 PM to sleep there overnight.  As before, I get covered all over (well, none to the privates, happily) with electrodes, which makes it super awkward to settle down or turn over without yanking wires, thereby more or less making sleeplessness a self-fulfilling prophecy.  However, despite this I was looking forward to a night without Martha (the cat, remember) meowing loudly at the bedroom door, or by the bed, or shoving her little bullet head under the blankets and aggressively snuggling up to me, making me worry about rolling over and crushing her and also diminishing my already unfairly small portion of the bed.  But as it turns out, they turfed me out at about 5:45 AM and I got all that when I crawled back into bed when I got home.  Anyway, here are some pictures of me looking silly with wires attached:

 Best part? The room had cable TV!  Worst part?  Cable is crap!  I ended up watching 1 1/2 X-Files episodes I'd already seen on BBC-America.  (Since when is the X-Files the BBC?)

The kicker: today a letter came in the mail saying our insurance was refusing to cover this, despite our Doctor's referral, because they hadn't been provided with "the right information."  Jami isn't as freaked out as me, however, as the insurance companies "try to pull this shit all the time."  But of course if they really DON'T cover it, it's probably about a thousand smackers for one crappy night's sleep that may not tell them anything.  Modern medicine - it's amazing!

A stroll round Big Seven Lake

A misty but not too cold October day?  Perfect for the longest walk in our repertoire!

 Clearly unprepared for the massive trek ahead!

 The big blue thing is the lake we are circumnavigating.

 Still hanging in there.

 Look!  Trees!

 What?  I'm thinking!

 Is that all we've walked?  Frederick is already wistfully mentioning the car.

 The creature from the Green Lagoon lurks within.

 Frederick putting on a brave face.

 Hitchhiking sounds good about now.

 I let Frederick rest within sight of the car.

 There it is in the background.

 Nearly there....

What our view would've been if we'd just sat in the car.