Horse oil and other oddities

It was a very cold and wet Halloween  I took out Maya and Tessa along with Naomi and Shanna. One house served jello shots to the adults

Hannah and Allie

my Bohemian souvenir from Prague

Fall here

apricot and plum brandy complete with floating fruit from Czech Republic

Steve's cousin's granddaughter as Frida Kahloe

trick or treaters Hannah's face here is so much like young Josh's

rain

new to me Romanian crystal

There was an estate sale in our neighborhood full of high end stuff. I thought paying $4 was a lot for a tote bag. Found it on line for $425 though I believe mine is a knock off

I paid $30 for this Lamborghini lambskin coat. It has $30 in the pocket, unfortunately Taiwanese dollars which is more like one dollar

who doesn't need a giant ampersand

lots of fancy skin care. I bought a few of these. Naomi loved them

We have been back for two weeks. Pretty fall colors have since morphed into dead brown grays and cold. I biked in the snow the other day but at least it was in the 30s. To keep my feet from freezing, I put plastic baggies on between two pairs of socks. And it will get much colder. A lot of my birds have returned as food elsewhere is low. I especially like my red bellied woodpeckers.

That surgery in July slowed me down quite a bit but I am recovering. Early in the week, I started to run at the speeds I did before the surgery. We are changing our insurance as I don't want to ever have to deal with those incompetent ones I dealt with concerning the surgery. From what I can tell, most of my bills have been paid though I think there might be one outstanding one.

All my flowers have since withered away from the frosts.

I have been seeing the kids, the grandkids and my friends.

Right before we left, we had a rare home owner's association meeting,. It will be the last one I ever go to. I now have an enemy. She has proclaimed herself in charge of the 'neighborhood beautification committee.' As she sees it, the reason we are not getting a million for our  houses is due to the presence of my unmanicured flowers. As by having flower beds I am not technically violating any association rules so she can't do anything about it other than trying to make me feel bad and possibly raise a posse of pitchfork wielding neighbors demanding I sod in all my gardens. She claims that a nearby neighborhood has houses going for a million and although they might be slightly bigger, as far as she can tell, the main reason they are worth more is because I don't live there.

Oh I wish I was prepared. I said nothing and nobody else did either. As it turns out, only one house in that neighborhood is over a million but it is 11,000 square feet (her house, the smallest is not even 3000 and Zillow rates my house with 100K more value than hers). But the biggest factor IMHO is there is a big Xpressway in her backyard and quite far from the other neighborhood. She might not mind M-14 in her backyard but others do. She might as well direct her energy to shutting that down.

The whole business made me mad and sad. I came across her and another neighbor walking together. The other neighbor was all friendly but this one gave me the sourest look one can imagine.

The owners of one of the biggest houses in our neighborhood abruptly left the country. I had met the woman, a physician  when I first moved in . She had locked herself out of her house and asked to use my phone and waited here until the locksmith showed. It seems like they hardly took anything with them, their food and toiletries and clothes still are here. They did hire a company that oversaw selling everything,,, even prescription drugs. Pawing through her stuff seemed a tad voyeuristic. She was quite a fan of Asian beauty products including the horse oil. At first I thought it was something you applied to horses but I looked it up. Horses have very little fat but the bit they do presumably confers magic to your skin. Very pricy. As a large Northern European derived person, you wouldn't think that I could possibly share clothes with a Taiwanese woman. She had this beautiful cashmere coat. Way too big but the leather coat fit perfectly. Although she seems to be the Queen of knockoffs (the bag, normally $500 was clearly one) the coat does seem authentic. Bonus it had pockets full of Taiwanese change. I'll just add it to  my strange currency box.

I finished the German Duolingo not that I was that fluent in it. I could at least read stuff. Until I figure out where I am going next, I am reviewing French. They had a hilarious skit on Saturday Night Live with Duolingo introducing "how to speak to Kids"