Out of Doors

September Writing Challenge - Prompt #20:

Outdoors

Here are a few things that happened outdoors this week:

I took Nicky and Daisy to walk around Silver Lake. I was hoping there would be some great fall foliage there. Nope. There wasn't. 

There is a spot on the mountain that looks like a hidden Mickey, and I always find it amusing. I had to take a quick picture to send to my sister-in-law because that's what we do.

So his ears are a bit wonky, bit still... HIDDEN MICKEY!!!

One morning when I got home from my morning walk, I sat in my backyard for a while studying my scriptures, and I heard sirens going down the road. Sirens are pretty normal since we live on a busy street, so I didn't pay much mind to them. I heard sirens pretty regularly for about half an hour. Then I finally looked up from my scriptures and saw this:

The plume looked like it might be close to my mom's house a few blocks away, so I texted her and asked her if there was a fire near her house. She responded with this photo from her back deck:

It was a nearby barn. They seemed to get it contained quickly, but (from what we know) three horses died in the fire. 

We made two attempts to see fall leaves this week. Silver Lake was a fail, and so was Parley's Canyon. There is a park in Parley's where we sometimes take our kids to look for golf balls (my kids are scavengers and love to find stuff) that has a lot of trees. We did not find fall foliage there, but we did find a snake. 

My kids informed me that it's only fun to look for golf balls with Dad. 

When we bought our house, it was known in the neighborhood as the "gargoyle house." The previous owners had installed two stone gargoyles on either side of the garage. They took the gargoyles with them when they moved, and we were left with what we refer to as the "gargoyle thrones." Sometimes I throw a pumpkin plant in the west gargoyle throne for the summer, as I did this year. 

The other day I pulled out the pumpkin vine because I wanted to get it cleaned up before it started dying and leaving crusty leaf residue everywhere. Here is the before and after:

I'll miss it! But I'm glad I got it cleaned up.

Speaking of pumpkins, we took the kids to pick pumpkins at Scotty's uncle's pumpkin patch the other day.

Don't be fooled by Daisy's jacket.

It was 90° outside.

It was there that I remembered the risk of crusty pumpkin vine carcasses and decided to clean up my pumpkin vine. Plus... none of our pumpkins survived anyway. We just had vines and little balls of rot. 

While the big kids are in school, Eva can be pretty demanding. This week she insisted that we go on a picnic at the park. I had so much to get done, and it was so hard for me to set it aside and take her to the park, but I knew it was the better choice. 

We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and played in the leaves. I pushed her on the swing, and then she made me go for a walk around the perimeter of the park. 

The weather lately has boon cool fall mornings and hot afternoons. The highs have been in the upper 80's. The fall leaves have been a little thwarted by the horrendous wind storms we had a few weeks ago. The leaves blew off the trees prematurely. We've had a tiny bit of rain, which we need desperately! Everything is on fire, and there's a regular haze of smoke that keeps settling in. So "outdoors" gets complicated from time to time, but we make it work.