So, there's still not much happening at Casa Gazza. We finally put down the last of the hardwood in the sunroom. Now we just need to buy some baseboards. We looked at the available options when we returned three out of our four remaining hardwood boxes to Home Depot (the other box had reached its 90-day return deadline a few weeks ago). It looks like we'll want to paint our baseboards white to match the walls, so we probably won't be getting around to that until spring. But the sunroom is basically ready for use, give or take the elusive leak in the ceiling.
We didn't do much for Thanksgiving this year. My brother was in town and the three of us went to the Blue Plate Diner for dinner on Sunday. Then on Monday I cooked and mushed a medium-sized pumpkin for pie purposes. If you need to cook pumpkin pieces for pie, but aren't sure whether you want to roast them, I definitely recommend microwaving rather than steaming. I spent an hour steaming pumpkin bits in the wok (we have a bamboo steamer we almost never use) before getting sick of it and discovering that you can just microwave a covered casserole dish full of pumpkin in about 6 minutes.
Next week we'll be turning pumpkin mush into a pie or two.
Neil spent some time cleaning up the mess in the sunroom and library and putting some shelving together this weekend. We've also cleaned up the yard a bit. Neil mowed and picked up apples, while I pulled up a LOT of baby spruce trees last weekend. Luckily, the weather has been nice for the most part.
And that's about it. Time to go into winter hibernation!
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Thanksgiving was a bit different for us, too. Enshie cooked a chicken,with stuffing and gravy, and pumpkin pie for the 2 of us. Our neighbour gave us a bottle of homebrewed wine for Thanksgiving - it was quite good, better than some that we buy.
There are several places here that do most of the work associated with wine brewing for you. A batch yields 30 bottles, so our neighbour is suggesting that several of us get together and brew different varieties so that we could swap some of each variety with each other. Sounds like a good Island thing to do.
This week we replaced the clear glass beside and over the front door with leaded water-glass sections. When it is dark outside and a light is on inside, someone outside can see shadows or blobs moving inside but no details. Much cosier - we don't feel like we are in a fishbowl now.
On Friday we walked along the seawall to our downtown coffee place - Perkins. It was warm and a clear blus sky, so we decided to take the ferry to Gabriola Island. Guess we are getting used to Nanaimo's outside coffee places, so we were quite surprised when we couldn't find a place to sit outside with Buddy to have coffee and a snack. Circled the entire island before we finally found a spot with some tables crammed along a narrow sidewalk. No sidewalks for walking along the roads and no friendly coffee spots, so we decided that we liked Nanaimo's atmosphere better.
We don't like the way the strata's landscaping contractor does some things. They put top-dressing on the lawn that looks like a sand/fine gravel mix. It is sitting on top of the grass in clumps because they didn't take the trouble to rake it into the grass. And the way they edge the lawn drives me crazy. But trying to get things changed really could drive us crazy, so we find that we have to just ignore some of these things.
We finally subscribed to Shaw's high definition TV service. I bought the combined HD box plus personal video recorder with a 160GB hard drive. It has some neat features like instant replay and it is quite easy to set up and play recorded programs.
Halloween coming up. Are you going to host your annual party? No hibernating for winter until after Halloween.
Cheers.
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