Welcome to November

Well, we voted this morning! I am keeping my fingers and toes and everything else crossed. I honestly think that I have never been more excited to vote for a candidate as I was today. Although I did think Bill Clinton was pretty wonderful, too. The funny thing was that we voted at Hope High School, which is an enormous building, and there were no signs outside to tell us where to go, and no volunteers or poll-workers outside the building - no one holding signs, no supporters, no one handing out stickers, nothing. Weird. We went in a tiny little side door to the cafeteria (someone saw us outside and told us where to go), and then we waited online for over 30 minutes to check in - because, for some reason, the A-L line was much longer than the M-Z line. And, they use paper ballots! So we went into little stand-up booths to fill in our choices with a black pen, and then entered our blackened ballot into a Scantron machine! The best part was that, afterwards, we went to Blue State Coffee (yes, it's a liberal establishment, can you tell from the name?!) and got free coffee/tea because we voted. Rumor has it that Ben & Jerry's is giving free ice cream to voters this afternoon. Hmmm...we may have to check that out, as well.

Lewis ended up having a great Halloween despite a rocky start. His friend Greg was supposed to come home from school with him on Friday and spend the night here, so that they could go Trick or Treating together. They were Miss America contestants, Miss Wyoming and Miss Nebraska. So you can imagine my surprise when Lewis showed up at home on Friday afternoon alone! Turns out that Greg hurt his back pretty badly in the soccer game (last one of the season, they beat Moses Brown!) on Thursday, and didn't come to school on Friday. It was very depressing. So Lewis called Greg to see if he was feeling any better, and Greg's mom invited Lewis to come over there and at least hang out and watch movies. Greg lives about 40 minutes away, so Lewis and I jumped in the car with his pumpkin (we hadn't carved it yet) and met them about halfway, near Wrentham, MA. It turned out that Greg did eventually feel well enough to Trick or Treat a little, so the boys did get all dressed up and get some goodies. Phew!! That was a close one. Terry and I, meanwhile, carved our own pumpkin (OK, he did it all by himself) and put it on the front porch, and proceeded to give out 5 big bags of candy by 8pm! Our little Trick or Treaters ranged in age from 3 to 20. We even gave one Brown student a bag for her candy, cause apparently she forgot one, poor thing. The little ones were the cutest, but the older ones had fabulous costumes. The best one was the two 12-13 year old boys who came dressed as Mac and PC. They were hilarious! When we ran out of candy, we turned off the porch lights and closed our front gate again, and thank goodness everyone got the hint!

So, after Lewis came home on Saturday, we decided to take advantage of the nice weather. We took Ozzy out for some fun on the fields at Moses Brown, and then went for a little day trip. It was beautiful and sunny when we left, and it got progressively cloudier and windier as the day wore on. We drove through Barrington and Warren to Bristol (which enabled our sleep-deprived and sugar-crashing son to nap in the backseat), and walked around a bit at Colt State Park. It was once a farm on the Narragansett Bay; Colonel Colt raised Jersey cows, and he erected numerous statues on his grounds, and encouraged the public to walk and picnic on his fields and enjoy the bay. The state of RI purchased the farm in 1965 to preserve it as green space. There were lots of people there walking their dogs, flying kites, even picnicking. Here's a self-timer photo we took overlooking the bay. On the way home, we stopped at this really cool store in Warren called Imagine, which had tons of cows and other silly things, and we got some ice cream, too.

Sunday we went to the Wrentham outlets, where we were able to find a winter coat for Lewis at the Columbia Sportswear outlet and some shoes for Terry. And, we were home in time to build a fire and watch football for the rest of the day!