It's been a few weeks, so here's some news!
NB and I endured a short-lived but annoying plague of fruit flies. We seem to have removed whatever it was that they were feeding on, though, because they seem to have died out. NB caught a cold, and then he didn't want it any more so he passed it on to me. I got a crab for my birthday! :D It was very exciting.
One evening we saw a porcupine in our backyard! It was too dark to take photos of it, but we watched it from the sunroom. It had its back turned to us and was wobbling gently, so that it looked like a grey gelatinous blob. We watched it wobble for a while and then got bored. The next day NB found an apple core in that spot, so it was probably dining on the few leftover fallen apples. We've kept an eye out for it, but it hasn't returned (as far as we know).
At the beginning of November some component of our furnace fan broke, so that it wouldn't stop running. We discovered this at midnight on a Saturday, of course, after it had been pumping cold air into our house for an hour. Luckily it's still not all that cold outside. We called the emergency furnace line, but the furnace guy didn't show up until Monday. We had to control the fan manually all day by using the circuit breaker. By Monday, the fan had managed to "fix" itself. We thought we might buy a new furnace, but the furnace guy recommended against it. He said that the old furnaces are far more reliable.
We've found some contractors to do our roof -- they were recommended by my boss, who has used them for his house and all his farm buildings. They won't be able to start until the spring, but that's just as well.
Apart from that, the weather has been fairly good, so we've been cycling in -- NB usually, I occasionally. The new (temporary?) bus station by Southgate is irritating, but they're putting up some heated shelters so hopefully that gets done before the really cold weather hits. There's still construction everywhere. It's very irritating.
Anyway, that's mostly it for us.
