first week of November

This week has been occupied with catching up on my Morning Time readings with Laura (Grade 9), having a nutritious lunch for everyone (including Seth who is home everyday for Reading Week) and spending a hour or more in the afternoon teaching Seth to drive stick shift and then coming home to do supper prep and answer messages.
We had spent an afternoon in late September working on taking off in first and getting into second. But it was only one day and you need a lot more time to develop muscle memory. So with the Chevy SUV not passing inspection, Shane is leasing another Honda which is due to arrive from the factory later this week. This new Honda will be an automatic and Shane has indicated that he wants Seth to use the older Honda for his travels to work and school in town. So that means Seth needs to master the manual transmission. So we have spent two afternoons in a row so far this week going down to the recreational complex parking lot and practicing parking in reverse and going into first and second. Yesterday we finally left the parking lot and went on some quieter roads close to the river where there are no signal lights, just deer.
The first deer encounter was just a cautionary slow down to make sure it didn't dart into the road from the driveway it was standing in. The second encounter was a large doe standing on the yellow line in the middle of the road. I advised him to slow way down and I put on our hazard lights to signal to the car that I could see in the distance coming behind us. He slowed way down but kept on coming towards her. She finally was spooked into leaving the road and galloping along the shoulder while we traveled slowly behind her to make sure she didn't leap back onto the roadway. She finally picked a spot and leaped over the guardrail into the trees and disappeared towards to the cove and we continued on to the park we were aiming for. 
Today we will practice again and maybe even go towards some of the busier intersections. Yikes!

Two or three weeks ago, I moved all of my potted plants inside. Some are flowers that I will try to overwinter the roots like geranium which I successfully did last year. This year, in addition to those, I am trying a begonia my mother-in-law gave me for Mother's Day and a lantana plant I bought for myself in memory of the hanging plants my mom used to put on her porch. I also brought in all the herbs and moved them to the basement where I have been using my new LED plant lights. But after two weeks, some of them are not doing that great like the cilantro, basil and green onions. So I'm bring them all back upstairs and I am thinking of putting them on a rack in Kate's southwestern room so they can get plenty of warm sunny afternoons and still be close for me to clip throughout the winter.
the basil and cilantro are so hard for me to manage so I need to do more homework on those plants.

I also have managed to get and walk by myself twice so far this week. On Sunday afternoon, we came home from Sunday lunch with our church family and it was so sunny and comfortable that I wanted to get back outside and enjoy it. So I quickly cleaned up the kitchen and then sat down and wrote up the lesson work for Laura's week. With all that done, I drove down to the trails behind the hockey arena and had a nice time with my camera and walking on and off the trails to investigate whatever caught my eye. After walking on the trails, I remembered we desperately needed napkins so I stopped at the dollar store. 
Then on Monday, after the driving practice session with Seth, I drove us to get coffee and then fueled by that caffeine burst and the still sunny bit of late afternoon, I went for a quick walk up our street and around the traffic circle and back down and feeling a bit more ambitious, I went off the road and down the very steep trail behind our house. That was hard but also good for me. A friend's dad has been building new homes down there and I had not been down that path for months. It was a very steep climb back up and the sun hadn't gone down yet so I made it back to our front porch with a pretty sunset to end a Monday.

From Sunday afternoon: a red squirrel nibbling a morsel on the trail.

Monday walk down the trail behind the house just before dusk.