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  Here is a little puzzle for you.  What are these colored poles?  Or where are they?  If you figure out where they are, you might be able to figure out what they are. A hint for Audrey:  I’ve out-geeked you this time!

   For my birthday this year, I gave a piano recital.  It was FUN!!!  Patrick and I had planned to do one in Seattle a few years ago, and since that’s not a possibility anymore, I decided to go ahead and continue on my own. Therapy for me.  There were some rough days preparing for it, for sure.   It was nice to prove to myself that I can still play an hour-long program from memory.  The brain is not dead yet.

    Noah will be 9 in a few weeks.  He held his own in the war, though I think I got the better of him a few times.

  Claire the bubble girl.

       Randy, Santa, and the tree, which I post so Audrey, Nicholas and Patrick can see the green plastic top in its place.  One year Patrick noticed hundreds of tiny spiders crawling up the topper, onto the ceiling.  We got our tree from the forest that year, and dang if the spiders didn’t hatch overnight.  Ah, nostalgia.

The Santa was a gift from my grandparents when I was eight years old.  He’s managed to survive all these years, though he hid behind the Christmas Cactus during the War.

  Claire and Noah are fearless about hot tubbing in cold weather.  They jumped in often, and one night Ginny joined their fun.

     Each year the kids make Gingerbread houses.  This year’s combined effort turned out pretty well.

  A few evenings ago, we gave Noah and Claire each a small nerf gun and told them to go to it.  After their ammo was spent, the four adults (and I’m using that term loosely) ambushed them with big guns, surprising the kids.  You should have seen their faces.    It was a WAR!  Claire clearly got into it.

  The City Building in Bath has a battleship weathervane, a nod to Bath Iron Works where many ships are built. If new city buildings followed their lead, what interesting weathervanes would we see?  A big potato in Boise?  A surfboard in Malibu?

   Old Town Portland’s inviting storefronts lured Randy, Ginny and I to do a bit of looking around on Saturday.  That’s Ginny walking ahead of the Something’s Fishy sign.

   On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, we drove the few minutes north to Bath, to the Maine Maritime Museum which is next to the Bath Iron Works.  It’s an indoor-outdoor museum.  Despite the snow, the temperatures were in the upper fifties in the afternoon, and the coldest spots at the museum were found inside the various buildings.  Those folks built ships in unheated buildings throughout the Maine winter.  Brrrrr….  Here’s Randy and Ginny checking out their navigation to the next exhibit.

  Noah is going to be popular with the girls, if he isn’t already. Here he is waiting for Thanksgiving dinner, and hanging out with some fish.  He was inside of the fish tank at LL Bean’s flagship store in Freeport.  Dad would have loved to watch those fish.

  Ginny cooked a wonderful feast for us.  We had the best time!  It was a wonderful weekend.  Thanks, Beisels!!

  If she could talk, Mia might say “what are YOU looking at?”  We’re trying to help her slim down, we really are.  Since she is, after all, a cat, we use her inherent curiosity to our advantage and coax her into running from room to room looking for affection.  Silly animal.  We’re hoping for a pound off this year.  Yes, that’s this year.

  The Mainer grandchildren did the holiday well, don’t you think?  So cute, Noah and Claire.  Miss you guys.

When the storm was about an hour old, the neighbor across the street lost one of his trees when it split down the middle.  He lost another large tree last night.

Then sun rose over a beautiful white blanket this morning.  We are lucky–we have buried utilities and usually we don’t lose power.  Randy’s been on the phone all morning assessing needs in the ward.  More folks are powerless than those of us with power.  Our biggest issues are phone and internet, which are both sporadic.

Isn’t it beautiful, though?  We received a foot of heavy, wet snow in about 9 hours.

Happy Halloween!

  Gavin is always moving–but once i got lucky and caught him before he actually hit the water    he’s not really walking on water; he’s about to break the surface  I miss them already.