Veterans’ Day seemed a big thing this year. I’d been asked a few weeks ago to do a presentation for a bunch of home-school kids about being a veteran, what it was like serving in the navy, etc and Friday was the day. I brought in the same PowerPoint presentation I put together like 3 years ago when I did the same talk for 5th graders at Lincoln, and last year for 3rd graders (I think?). There were some technical difficulties (I wanted to put the presentation on the big screen but nobody could figure it out, so I wound up plugging the laptop into a TV in one of the Sunday school rooms and cramming all the kids in there. The talk could be only a few minutes long but the kids have a million questions (why is that ship called a destroyer? Was there ever a submarine under your ship? Did you ever shoot a missile?) and like the cool pictures a lot. There were a couple other veterans there doing the same thing right before me, but I was the only one with pictures. Later Friday, Luke came over to our house for a sleepover with Alex, while at the same time, Missy was over at the Rahn’s for a sleepover with Abby. The girls had also made plans to get together with some other friends (like 6 or 7 girls altogether) and go see “Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them,” and we were chauffeurs for that. The girls all sat together and Beth and I and a couple other parents sat a couple rows back. Alex and Luke chose to stay at home instead so they were home alone while everyone else saw the movie. Saturday was mostly about the leaves. Every year, the leaves on all the oak trees in the backyard stay on the trees until it completely sucks to clean them up. This past week was unusually warm for mid-November, even as late as Friday it was 75 degrees. Then the weather turned, and it got good and cold awfully fast. When I got up Saturday, it was snowing. And this was the weekend that the leaves were finally mostly down, and I had the time. Anyway, I went to the new tool rental place in town (since the one I’d used for the past few years has closed) and fortunately they had one of those mondo walk-behind leaf blowers as well so I rented it for the rest of the morning. There are times I hate the fence that runs through our backyard, mostly when I’m trying to clear leaves…it only took an hour or two to blow the entire backyard clear but then the gigantic piles were all along the fence and too big to get through the gate, so I returned the blower (which, by the way, is not easy to get into the back of a truck by yourself) and switched to the rake and tarp method. Luckily I have 3 teen/tweens to help out, with varying degrees of grudging, and we were able to get everything hauled to the overgrown area by the ditch in another couple hours, in a snow flurry that made the pile of leaves get wetter, colder, heavier, harder to move, and muddier by the minute. But, it’s done, and I love that. Beth made soup the rest of Saturday, and I put strings of light up on the big spruce tree in our front yard. It is a very tall tree nowadays, and I had to use two joined 10’ PVC pipes with another 3’ length taped onto it to get the end of the first string of lights to the top. Not. Very. Easy. But I did eventually get to stay up there, and used up 6 strings of lights before getting halfway down. I had to run to Menard’s to get more lights. By the end I probably had about 200’ of lights strung together, which was too much and the fuses in the strings blew. Twice. I’m going to have to separate the strings or these lights will not stay lit.