Autumn stuff

I'm still alive.  Buried under unfinished jobs,  but still kicking.  I always think of gardening season as my busiest, but maybe garden harvesting is even busier.  Plus I have this habit of jumping to the fun stuff before the work stuff.

Early September was really nice over in our household.  School is in full swing and seems to be going well (yay!).  September is a month of extreme cheque writing it seems, so we decided to hold off on piano lessons until October.  I'm so glad we did and if our piano teachers are okay with it, I wanted to record and remember this decision and do it again forever after.  With school starting, so did bands, and Guides, Pathfinders and Youth Group, choir and community league meetings, school parent council and fundraiser meetings.  It's too much for one month.

Plus, remember "jumping to the fun stuff"?  The weather was great in early September and Beth and I managed to kayak down the river from Fort Edmonton to Capilano Bridge one Saturday. 4 long hours in the sun.

I'd never seen the city from this perspective before.  It was beautiful. 

It was also so slow-moving and shallow that I had to get off and walk a couple of times, pulling the kayak to deeper waters.  That was something I never expected.  It looks like such a big river from above.  Not in the fall, apparently.

We tried to kayak down the Sturgeon River the next day, not having learned our lesson on the Saturday and found ourselves stuck in the mud a few times there.  I won't do the Sturgeon in the fall again.  It may be pretty but it's miserable to walk through and there's virtually no current at the section we tried.  However, we spent two days in the unexpected sunshine on the water in the fall.  Wonderful!

And other fun stuff - I took my annual trip to the wine country.  Awesome!  Swimming in the lake, reading on beaches, tasting wine and picnicing with friends.  And even a dinner with my big sister.  It was so much fun, but maybe a day too long actually.  By the end, my head was back at home and my body was eager to get home too.  It's great to be disconnected from regular life for a while, but I felt...disconnected from my family too.  It was good to be home and back in the swing of regular life.

Now maybe I'll get back to blogging too, 'cause you missed me, right?