I’m starting this post on Friday night and it is raining outside.

The Husband, kids and I just got back a bit ago from having pizza with my parents and watching a few episodes of Newhart.

Now we are inside our cozy house watching an old Noir movie (The Asphalt Jungle).

The dog is sitting next to me, cuddled up and I am thinking how blessed we are to be here even as we face some future uncertainty.

There is so much heartache around the world and it has touched many of us in different ways.

Tonight, though, we are safe and warm.

Last weekend The Husband and I attended a charity event near us where people pay high ticket prices to have the chance to win $3,000.

We didn’t win but it was nice to get out because we don’t do it that often.

They had a dinner before hand and then they started to call numbers of the participants. If the person’s number was called then they were eliminated from the chance to win the money. Some people won gift certificates or $125 when they were eliminated. We did not because that’s our luck – stinky.

They would eliminate around ten people and then have an intermission where everyone would go onto the dance floor for 15 minutes or so and – obviously dance.

There was a local DJ playing the music and most of the music was oldies. At one point they played Unchained Melody and everyone over the age of 50 descended onto the floor and began to sway in the green and blue lights. I’d actually say most of them were more like over the age of 60.

The Husband and I didn’t dance but we did hold hands and watch all the older people dancing away. We aren’t really dancers. I suppose we could have swayed, which is what we did at our wedding.

We would have liked to have won the money but we are homebodies so we were kind of glad when we were eliminated fairly early in the night so we could slip out and go pick up Little Miss from her grandparents. The Boy had stayed home to play video games. I had broken out a book already anyhow. I didn’t really know that many people and am not a partier at all so I read a book while everyone danced.

On our way to the event we noticed there were deer everywhere we looked practically. There were groups of 15-20 does all gathered together in fields, along the roads, and in the woods. It was a little eerie really.

I’ve lived in Pennsylvania my whole life and never remembered seeing so many together like that. On the way back from the charity event they were right at the edges of the road, the headlights barely illuminating them. We were worried one might jump out in front of us.

Imagine how foolish I felt when there was an article on a local TV station site a few days later reminding people to be careful because it was mating season for the white tailed deer.

Oh.

I suppose that explained why they were all out there in groups – they were waiting for their man to show up and court them.

The rest of our week was very uneventful for the most part. We did schoolwork, The Husband went to work, The Boy to trade school in the morning, and I finished Gladwynn Grant Takes Center Stage. The first draft anyhow. I’ll be editing and revising all this week.

After we got back from my parents’ house last night, we had some excitement when the cat started pawing inside our downstairs closet. I had a feeling she had something trapped because she was trying to crawl up the wall, her tail swishing crazily. I looked up and a mouse was sitting on the coat hanger bar inside the closet, trying to pretend it wasn’t there. I have no idea where it went but as Little Miss and I called The Husband to come look, the mouse disappeared as if in thin air. We thought it had run into a pair of coveralls that were hanging in there so The Husband tossed it out on the back porch. When he went in to clean out the shelf where he found mouse droppings, though, the mouse started running again. It hid behind some boxes but when he moved the boxes it was gone again. He couldn’t see any holes in the wall so he had no idea where it went.

The cat, by the way, took off when The Husband started pulling things out of the closet. She then escaped out the back door into the darkness when I went to take the dog out to use the bathroom.

“You’re fired!” I yelled after her. “You can catch all those mice outside but you can’t get them in the house?! Really?!”

Our other cat just sat in the kitchen floor like she was bored with it all. She’s also been fired.

I suppose we will keep them despite their failures.

After the mouse craziness, we headed to bed and even more weirdness occurred when I plugged in my phone charger (which has been acting up lately) and it shorted out and caused all the outlets in the room I was in to stop working.

Now, I didn’t know it had flipped a breaker so I sat for 20 minutes in despair, thinking that my phone had been shorted out because it would not charge. I used every charger in every outlet in my daughter’s room.

I was even starting to cry because I use my phone at night to listen to podcasts if I can’t fall asleep or even as a flashlight. I was being really silly about it all so my almost 17-year-old came to my rescue. He took the phone and charger and plugged it in in our hallway and it immediately started working.

That clued us in that the shorting out of the charger (which was an Apple charger, I might add) had blown the breaker for my daughter’s room. We decided it was too late to mess with it and The Husband was already asleep. In the morning we found out that not only had it messed up the outlets in my daughter’s room but also three lights downstairs, including our outside light.

My dad helped us figure that out earlier today.

As an aside, there are an insane amount of outlets in this house. We just discovered more of them in the last month that we had never seen before even though they were in plain sight. For example, last week I asked my husband to plug my phone in outside the bathroom door. He said, “Where?”

I told him I’d just found the outlet outside the door.

“Really?” he said. “How did I never see that?!”

He asked that because it is seriously right there – in plain sight – in our hallway. Across the hall is nother one.

The whole exchange  reminded me of this scene in an episode of Doctor Who where the Doctor tells Amelia Pond that there is another door in her house and she says there isn’t but he says to look through the corner of her eye and she’ll see it. She does and goes into the room the door leads to. An alien is behind her in the room and she says she can’t see anything but she knows something is there and he tells her not to look in the corner of her eye. Unfortunately, she does.

Shudder.

Here is part of the scene, if you’ve never seen it:

Of course when I see that scene I think of my favorite scene from that episode. It’s right after The Doctor has regenerated from being my favorite doctor, David Tennant, into my second favorite Doctor, Matt Smith, and he’s starving but he can’t remember what food he likes.

I’ll share that one too for fun:

So here we are on Saturday and I headed out this morning to take some photos of the changing leaves. I hadn’t had much water to drink, or much to eat, and the pressure dropped lower than I’d seen it in a long time, so I didn’t feel so great when I went for my drive. That led to fewer photos than I wanted to take but I hope to go out again later this afternoon and snap some more.

I have issues with lower barometric pressure. My head feels weird and my muscles go weak and hurt and – well, I’m a mess when the barometric pressure drops.

I feel much better after some water and food, but still not great.

We really need some more sun. It was cloudy and miserable all week and I thought we were supposed to have more sun this weekend. Apparently not.

Since it’s going to remain cloudy, I guess I’ll simply have to take photos of leaves without pretty sun filtering through them.

Our hillsides are not really ablaze with color at this point. A lot of our leaves have fallen off and, of course, there are those dead ash trees (killed, as I’ve mentioned here before, by the ash bore) but there are still individual trees that are beautiful and eye-catching.

I’ll share a few of the photos I took today and a few tomorrow in my Sunday Bookends post.

As I wrap up this post I am going to head downstairs from where I am huddled under some covers in bed make some tea and then come back up and huddle under the covers some more.

Let the rest of the family fend for themselves until the sun comes back out, I say.

How was your week last week? Do anything fun or interesting?

Let me know in the comments.