Last of the Summery Days

Summer is definitely over, and autumn is moving right along. It was warm and sticky yesterday, a humidex of 27C wasn’t very comfortable. Some time was spent sitting and watching the wind strip the trees of their orange and yellow glory. Sitting on the porch allows a perusal of the yard, sort of like stopping to smell the roses, but in this case it was stopping to assess the projects. A lawn chair under the tree near the back of the yard had overturned in the wind. It was covered with dead leaves, and was brushed off before bringing it onto the porch and setting it in place for Attila to sit in. All of the white plastic lawn chairs were stacked neatly. The three five gallon pails that littered the porch were collected, cleaned, stacked, and stowed away in Iris the trailer. These pails constitute the benign element of our composting toilet system at the Rideau Camp. The orange one is a backup to use as a toilet, but it is still unused and new. The white one contains peat moss for use with the composting toilet. The blue one is used for various things that do not require that it be sterilized. These buckets will go out to the Rideau Camp in the spring.

Yesterday I decided to read the letter informing us that we were being audited. Attila takes care of the taxes, but he had been dragging his feet on getting this taken care of, and I was beginning to fret about it. I was shocked to read that we had 30 days to respond, and that there were only a few days left to make that response. Obviously Attila dropped the ball on this one. When Attila got home from work we got busy preparing the documents needed for submission. There were quite a few of them, scanned into digital files to submit online. I did all the scanning, there were 26 files with multiple documents in each file. This took hours. When we finally logged in to submit the files, we discovered that only 10 files can be submitted. good God! Back to the drawing board. I ended up converting all the files to pdf format, then downloading software to merge pdf files, then merging files with similar information in them, such as fuel receipts. Finally, I had reduced the number of files to eight, we were ready for submission. Sigh. When we finally logged in to the site, we discovered that each file had to be uploaded separately, with a description. We were both rather weary by the time we clicked on the Submit button! I have my fingers crossed that we got it right and that will be the end of it!

Early this morning Attila loaded the old G4, Apple Display, speakers, and scanner, into Tank. I will be driving to the city to the Restore today, to leave all of this in the ewaste bin, which is open to the public, to remove items for free. I hope someone rescues the system! The living room seems almost bare now that it has been moved out, it took up almost 20% of the floor space, which tells you how little there is.

While I was out and about I dropped off a twin comforter set at the local women’s shelter. It is in excellent condition, freshly washed, and is suitable for a little boy. This comforter set came free, with the free twin bed I found at a local yard sale. We gave the bed away to a single Dad setting up his first apartment with his son, and Attila was using the comforter, but when we bought the duvets, the comforter was no longer needed. While I was at the Women’s Shelter I asked if they needed a twin box spring, and happily they said they could use it, so this evening Attila dragged it out to the car and secured it on the roof racks for the short drive to the shelter.

The weather was wonderful today, a bit chilly, definitely sweater weather, but sunny and breezy and colourful. I enjoyed my drive into the city and home again. It was a good day to be out and driving around, as it is supposed to rain for the next few days.

Worldly Distractions

Weather

14°C
Date: 9:00 PM EDT Wednesday 19 October 2016
Condition: Partly Cloudy
Pressure: 102.1 kPa
Tendency: rising
Visibility: 24 km
Temperature: 14.4°C
Dewpoint: 12.1°C
Humidity: 86%
Wind: SW 10 km/h

Quote

“Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendour, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.”
James Thurber
1894 – 1961

Having lived a relatively isolated youth, I read avidly, and mistakenly thought that the literature that I read represented the world beyond my experience. Such a disappointment that literature shone a light on the few, while the world was populated by the many.

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Bex Crowell

It’s a shame that fall is such a short season, I mean, while the colorful leaves are on the trees. One wind storm and they are down. It’s always something. We have some color here but not a lot and yet the leaves are falling already.

Teri

Count me in with Fall being my favorite season! With leaves, we have our ash tree out front which is now almost naked, but many of the other trees still have their leaves or may even be green. Works for me! Makes my Fall longer. 🙂

Interesting about your ReStore having a free area where you can dispose of items free. I wonder if ours is like that? If we were to get rid of our excess electronics it would probably otherwise cost a pretty penny at the dump. They have fees for electronics, even though the gov’t collects those fees up front when you buy the items. Doesn’t seem quite fair.

Ugh, what a mess with the audit. Good thing you caught the time limit on that!

I’m slow on some things. Hadn’t thought of the local women’s shelter as a place to bring comforters and such that are in reasonable shape. I’ll have to give that a thought and look around at what else would be useful over there.