I was so excited when the weather finally cooled off. I had been steadily working to improve our back yard, even throughout the heat of the summer (though admittedly, in smaller doses). But once the cooler weather in September arrived, I was ready to get some things accomplished. As mentioned in the last post, I planted a bunch of grass plugs in this shady, difficult part of the yard. I had also purchased several waves of shade-tolerant plants to fill in some bare spots and maybe even recondition one of the remaining planting areas. And, I scheduled our tree guy to come see what needed taking care of.

Fine 2020, take our tree yet too.

It turns out, there was a lot to take care of. I had him look at this big ash tree in the back yard whose bark was showing signs of stress. He took a look at it, thonking it with his mallet, checking it from all angles. He started making phone calls, looking increasingly agitated. Eventually he carefully explained to me that the collapse of the tree was imminent, that we really needed to have it removed as soon as possible, and that he was scheduled out for something like ten weeks. This tree, which we all loved, had lots of big, sprawling branches that drooped gracefully toward the house, shading us from the worst of the summer sun, which meant that there was only one direction it was going to fall once it did finally come down.

He redirected us to another person right away and made sure they knew what was going on. I busied myself UN-planting a bunch of the stuff I had planted throughout the year, in hopes of it *not* getting crushed by felled tree limbs. I hurried at this task, thinking the tree was going to be removed in the near term. It wound up taking more than a month to finally, finally get the House Crusher removed from the back yard. Because it wasn’t safe to climb up in the tree, they wound up using a man lift to cut down the upper part of the tree. All told, things are much brighter in our back yard now. At the moment, I’m enjoying it; it seems less dreary. We’ll see how we all feel come next May.

I think it took all of Maya’s effort not to hug Anna.

Thanks to the current pandemic, we haven’t really seen people socially in person in a very long time. After so many months of this dragging on, I think it’s clear that COVID-19 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and so we have been working to mentally shift from the lockdown-as-much-as-possible-all-the-time mentality to one that has us developing strategies for living with the virus instead. To that end, we’ve done a couple of things differently lately. First, in honor of our now long-standing tradition, we asked Anna if she’d be willing to come over to draw the kids’ halloween pumpkins for them, and she said she would! We all wore masks and hung out on the front porch and had a really nice in-person visit for a change. She drew a dragon for Maya (of course) and a silly jack-o’-lantern face for Ian.

In the spirit of the season, Sean sprung for some fun Halloween doughnuts from Krispy Kreme. Maya was in love. Ian still to this day mostly just picks the icing and sprinkles off whatever doughnut he eats. In deference to the coronavirus, we both went and voted early. Maya in particular was ON US to go vote – we’re assuming they were talking about it at school. I mean, honestly kid, we just wanted to get past the rush the first week. They’re old enough to pay attention to what’s going on these days, and I would liked to have take them along to vote this year. I just couldn’t justify the risk.

The biggest to-do that week, anyway.

At the kids’ school, they have an annual fundraiser called the Big To-Do. We haven’t ever gone in the past. We just donated money to the PTA and called it good. This year though, they were doing a little Hawaiian feast that you could purchase and that would be delivered to your door. In 2020, the year that just keeps on giving, we often find ourselves saying eff it, why not. And so, one weekend in late-October, we had delivered to our house a big container of Hawaiian chicken and rice, a couple tubs of macaroni salad, fixin’s for pineapple upside down cake, a couple cans of piña colada mixer, and some cute little leis and hair barrettes and fun little things to hold up for photos. Because it was Something Different for a Change, the kids were ecstatic.

Eyeball pong was a hit!

Then on Halloween, we did the most amazing thing. We went to our friends’ house and had a small two-family Halloween party! They have similar coronavirus protocols to us, and after some hemming and hawing (mostly from me), we decided to go for it. The kids were tha-rilled. No coronavirus masks? Nope. No 6-feet of distance? Nope. We haven’t experienced this much *normal* in ages. And while we helped a bit with supplies and set-up, most of the party planning was done by our friends. There was “Eyeball Pong” (think beer pong, but with plastic eyeballs to throw and no actual beer). The kids made slime. The bashed the hell out of a ghost-shaped piñata. There was also some Halloween cookie decorating, and a very fun glow-in-the-dark egg hunt. They ate too much candy, sure, but they also had skull-shaped calzones and meatballs fashioned to look like creepy eyeballs. At the end of the night, they rested and watched a movie.

Tent, Arthur Tent.

Because the kids had the day off school on November 3rd, and because we had already voted, we thought we’d test out camping with the kids. We acquired the giantest family tent I think I’ve ever been in, loaded the ol’ Prius to the gills, and headed out to Muleshoe Bend, which is all of an hour away, to camp along Lake Travis. As we were setting up the tent, Sean (I think it was Sean), decided its name was Tent, Arthur Tent in homage to Arther Dent of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame. Tent, Arthur Tent was going to be excellent for our clear, cool evening because its rainfly could be left off, and we could all lay cozily in the tent and stare up at all the lovely stars. It was beautiful.

Snug.

At least it was until the fog rolled in. Around two in the morning Sean nudged me awake (or alerted me to the fact that he was awake anyway, since I wasn’t really sleeping well) to let me know he was getting dripped in the head with water from the roof of the tent. It wasn’t raining, but sure enough, the slow and steady pat-pat-pat of water drops splatting the tent floor could be heard. A quick look outside made it clear that what was happening was that the fog from the lake was condensing on our tent (and our car, and the couple things we’d left out on the picnic table) and dripping on our faces. Luckily, we were able to install the rain fly and more or less get the inside of the tent dried enough to be sleep-worthy again. Incredibly, the kids slept through all of it: the drips, the rainfly installation, the lights of the car blinking when I relocked it, us crawling out of and into the tent.

Lake fog.

We cooked our breakfast and warmed up a bit and then went and hiked a couple miles. After lunch, we let the kids play down at the lake for a while before dismantling our tent and heading back into town in time to catch Ian’s guitar lesson. The biggest lesson we learned from this experience was that we should have unearthed our wool socks for the trip. Those half-damp cotton socks were the absolute pits around 2:30 in the morning after installing the rainfly and crawling back in our sleeping bags to try and warm back up from the 37-degree evening.

Our coronavirus cases since even the end of October have been climbing at an alarming rate. Here are the numbers from what I screen captured on Sunday evening vs. what I had recorded for our last post. Travis County – 10/4 29,799 cases and 429 deaths – 11/8 33,168 cases and 457 deaths. Texas – 10/4 790,194 cases and 16,320 deaths – 11/8 990,930 cases and 19,184 deaths. United States – 10/4 7,420,779 cases and 209,821 deaths – 11/8 9,962,900 cases and 237,567 deaths. The World – 10/4 35,078,236 cases and 1,036,104 deaths – 11/8 50,327,258 cases and 1,255,490 deaths.