A Little Bit of Everything!

Well....the days are flying by quickly! Errands occupy almost every day...Sparky is burning up coins and gas on the toll road making trips to Angola, IN, a great little town on the border of Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. There's a great restaurant there called Captain's Cabin. There are some great campgrounds in Angola, too--if you are on the way to Ohio or Michigan and need a stopover...Circle B Campground is a good one, Yogi Bear Campground (with Barton Lake RV supplies and service right next door), and my favorite--Pokagon State Park. I'll have to stop by and get some photos from the state park and some more nature preserves the next time we're heading to Angola, which is Wednesday. It's about an hour's drive from Elkhart...There's even an excellent winery in the little town of Fremont right next to Angola--Satek Winery. We're going to Angola because we've got to get more stuff from that darn storage shed! Hey, maybe we'll get some wine from the winery while we're at it! (Eldo explains, Sparky's the wino in the family, I'm a beer man--micro brews!) AHEM! No airing dirty laundry on the blog! Just kidding, folks! I like wine, but not to excess!

Off to see the tax guy today to get 2012 affairs in order since things got a little bit more complicated as I'm not an Indiana resident any more....Didn't visit the storage shed from hell today, not enough time! The storage shed from hell is the one that is packed with black garbage bags piled from floor halfway up the 9 X 17 ft. cubicle, covering a multitude of crates and boxes. And of course the black garbage bags are not labeled due to haste in packing when we left a year and a half ago. Every time we go there we have to empty half the shed out to get to anything, in order to be able to move around, open up taped boxes even though they are labeled because we can't find an item someplace else, so maybe it's in one of the labeled boxes. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. This is where it would have been helpful for one of us to have an anal retentive personality--NOBODY in this duo (Sparky and Eldo) is particularly organized, although Sparky tries her best to be and so does E. (Sparky is IMPULSIVE, but not too organized, explains E.) I've met people who are EXTREMELY organized, to the point where you wonder how the spouse/better half can put up with that, but it would be nice to be just a little anal about organizing, if only for the contents in the storage shed....(sigh!) (Now, Sparky, you should explain that you ARE anal about SOME things--like which way the toilet paper unrolls, having YOUR stuff on YOUR side of the  medicine cabinet, having the towels hang just so from the towel rods, and---) Moving right along here.....

Swan Lake--actually, Simonton Lake

What ELSE did we do today? Sparky rode her bike around the neighborhood outside the campground for a bit. There is a lake very close by, Simonton Lake. The lake has a boat launch, so you could kayak here if you wanted to...Kayak? Did somebody say kayak? (Sparky is still smarting from not winning that kayak at the Gypsy Journal Rally...Start saving your dollars, woman! says a helpful Eldo.) Yep, gotta do that...after my trip to D.C. to see my daughter for her birthday next week, after Christmas, and after my trip to Detroit in January for my sister's 70th birthday. She's had two bouts of breast cancer over the years and is doing very well...she's A-OK and wants to celebrate making it to another BIG birthday!

While riding my bike today, I saw this--something you hardly ever see any more...

I use to LOVE the smell of burning leaves....for some reason, even though my father worked us hard every weekend having us do chores and taking care of a very big yard which seemed endless in needing care, I have fond memories of the smell of burning leaves in our driveway on a brisk fall morning. I still LOVE to rake leaves, shovel snow and mow grass. (I know, she's a little weird, says E. She also loves very cold temperatures. But she's still lovable anyway!) But occasionally, when we hit pockets of major leaf burning, where they still allow it--the smell gets to be too much! Guess the lungs don't handle it quite as well as they use to. I just don't remember all the smoke pollution when I was a kid, but boy, I sure notice it now!

It was yet another beautiful Indian summer fall day...temps were in the high seventies today, might have topped out at 80...lots of sunshine.....beautiful fall colors right here in north central Indiana.....

                                                                       Until tomorrow......