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.

This week has been a heavy week and while I have so much I want to say today on the terrorism that struck Israel a week ago today, I also like to keep my blog as a safe place where people can escape for a bit. So today I will do my best not to bring the mood down, so to speak. I have expressed my concerns and my anger and my heartbreak on my social media sites (Instagram and Facebook) so you can read there if you would like to know my feelings.

For now, though, I’m going to ask what tea or coffee you are drinking this week. Or if it isn’t coffee or tea, what’s the warm or cold drink you’re reaching for as you read, write, or just hang out with others?

Earlier in the week I was drinking my old reliable of peppermint tea but today I am sipping hot cocoa with cocoa powder in lactose-free milk and maple syrup as the sweetener.

The warmth of my drink is needed right now as our temperatures have dropped significantly in the last week. Not winter temperatures just yet, but we are getting there.

A blogger friend commented on one of my posts that they are looking forward to my fall photos this year. I winced a bit when I read that because I have not taken many fall photos this year and our leaves are almost gone. I’m going to try to make up for not taking many and get some close-ups of the leaves we will have on the trees this week.

For now, I have a few of the leaves Little Miss and I have been picking up as we walk to our car or around the house. I’ve also added in a photo of the bacon pancakes I tried to make for the kids, as well as a view from my parents and the tree in our backyard.

This past week was somewhat routine. I was glued to the news and crying a lot but we also made time for homeschooling (though not all I wanted to do) and visiting with a former pastor and his wife who visited my parents yesterday.

My parents had offered this pastor, his wife, and their three daughters a place to stay more than 20 years ago when the pastor was sort of pushed out of the church that we were attending. It was an awkward time and sometimes I am surprised that I continued to go to that church for many years after that mess.

He was criticized for not bringing in enough new members/money and stepped down. Unsure of their next steps he and his wife were offered to stay in the house I grew up in by my parents. They spent three years there and yesterday they were able to thank my parents for the shelter they gave them from the storm.

They were also able to update them on their lives and the lives of their daughters and now grandchildren. They live three hours away and the woman had a hip replacement this summer so it was extremely nice of them to make the trip all the way up to see my parents.

This is the second former pastor of the church to make a special effort to see my parents in a month. No one from the current church family has contacted them to check on them or to see why they stopped attending the church and that’s been very disappointing, but sadly predictable in this day and age.

I didn’t mean the above statement to be as negative as it sounded – it’s just the way it is right now and it’s sad, but visiting with those former pastors and their wives really uplifted my parents’ spirits and I am grateful to them for making my parents feel special.

This weekend we are taking it easy other than attending a fundraising event for a local charity organization. That will be later this evening and the introvert in me is screaming at me to stay home, but the wife in me says I should actually attend an event with my husband for once since he has to go to so many for work and I rarely join him. I’m not a social person,, but he’s also working at these events so I don’t like to distract him. Tonight should be fun but after that, I am hiding away for the rest of the weekend and into next week.

I do have one homeschool event to possibly attend Monday but the next week is fairly clear for any major events, thankfully. I am really looking forward to being home and taking our time for schoolwork and making soup and whatever else we can do when it is too cold or snowy to go anywhere. Hopefully, I will also take some time to capture some photos before all the leaves fall off the trees.

How was your week last week and what are you looking forward to next week? Let me know in the comments.

Also, don’t forget to share one of your favorite blog posts from the week on the Weekend Traffic Jam blog link which you can find here:

Has anyone noticed how this feature used to be Saturday Morning Chat and now it is Saturday Afternoon Chat? If you haven’t, that’s what happened. I used to write this post on Fridays but I always seem to forget to finish it until Saturday morning now so it goes up on Saturday Afternoon instead.

Autumn came to our area this week and that meant more mornings with a cup of tea sweetened with local honey and more evenings curled up under a blanket while I wrote or read a book.

I had been out of peppermint tea, which is my comfort tea, but ordered a box online. It was a tea that wasn’t my normal organic tea.

Imagine my disappointment when it had no taste whatsoever. It was the weirdest thing and I’ve decided to no longer order tea off Amazon. Luckily, The Husband picked me up my normal tea yesterday, and that first cup was much better and just in time for the cooler weather.

It’s funny because I really wanted autumn to come but now that the weather has cooled down, I find myself melancholy over how quick summer went by and how we didn’t do as much as I wish we had as a family.

We did spend time together and go to the pool a lot but we did not have any big trips and that was disappointing. We can always plan for trips other times in the year, of course.

I also feel bad that a lot of people really rushed summer this year. I don’t know why people wanted the coziness of fall again but online there were YouTubers and others sharing how much they wanted it to be fall. I don’t remember the fall craziness being as intense in other years.

Maybe people just want to escape people again because so many people in the world today are miserable and rude. I don’t know that that is why I wanted autumn to come. I just like being cozy and not feeling so rushed all the time to get outside and enjoy the nice weather like I do in summer. Yet, I will miss being able to get outside more and enjoy the weather. Little Miss and I stayed inside too much on some days this summer, but neither of us enjoys the high humidity, which we had a lot of this year.

You can tell the weather is getting cooler, by the way, because our cats Pixel and Scout are getting a lot cuddlier. They want to lay on my chest and Scout is back to laying on our daughter’s pillow most nights. One night this week she stayed there the entire night but then left after she threw up. *Cue sarcasm alert* Good times. I love cleaning up cat puke at 7:30 in the morning and also taking a couple of tiny pieces out of our daughter’s hair. Ew.

Luckily that’s the first time that’s happened.

Last night the upstairs was very humid so we ran our air conditioner and fan. While reading to Little Miss, I noticed all three animals had  taken up residence on the bed.

A few changes are coming to our family this autumn, the main one being that The Boy is attending a career center two and a half hours a day every day during the week.

He rides a bus from our small town to another small town twenty minutes away for the class.

He, Little Miss, and I are the night owls in the family and it’s been an adjustment the last couple of days with him needing to go to bed early and get up early. I miss our late nights together because that is when he is the chattiest.

The Husband is also used to his quiet, early mornings when he gets ready for work but now The Boy is up with him. It’s thrown all of our schedules off a little bit, but we will get used to it. The career center class is an excellent opportunity and I am very grateful for the local school district helping us get him in to the center since it is usually for public school students.

The schools around here started Thursday, which I thought was really odd. It really didn’t give students very long to get used to their schedule before they were off a couple of days again. Usually they start on a Wednesday. I’m not sure why there was a change this year. Either way – school is underway again.

Little Miss and I started a very shortened version of homeschool on Wednesday and will get more serious about it this next week. We started with a little history and English.

I’ll start homeschool lessons with The Boy at a later date.

I figured I’d let him get used to getting up early again for school before we try to add math, history, and science to the Building and Construction class he’s taking at the career center. Homeschooling allows us to have a very flexible schedule and I know The Boy already misses that but I will be giving him plenty of time to relax when he returns from the career center before cracking the whip (a suggestion from my brother) and making him work on his other subjects.

It looks like Little Miss and I will be joining a homeschool co-op this year. She and I will meet with other homeschoolers once a week throughout the year. The only downside will be the increased chances of colds, but, well, we could also get them at the other events she will do throughout the school year – including Awana and gymnastics. Remember how I once wrote that I planned for autumn to be calmer? Yeah – apparently not, or at least not for two days out of the week.

Last Sunday we had our last official summer swim with Little Miss’s friends. The temperatures are supposed to go down this week so I don’t know if we will be able to have any more swim days. Sometimes we get in our last swim around or on Labor Day.

We certainly could have used a dip in the pool when the humidity jumped up yesterday. I thought the rise in humidity meant storms were coming but they never did. I was glad they didn’t because we had a lot of storms this summer and I suffer from silent migraines that affect my balance and cognitive state but luckily don’t often leave me with a headache.

Today I’m going to head to my parents to help clean. Tomorrow we will have another family day, but, again, probably no swimming.

Next week in addition to homeschooling I hope to be able to work on putting together my grandfather’s poems, maybe copying them into the computer so I can self-publish them for my family. We have piles of them that he wrote over the years – some of them to waitresses or people he met on his and my grandmother’s travels around the country. Eventually, I hope to share more of them on here.

This week I’ll also be in planning mode for my parents’ anniversary party in September. They will be married 60 years on September 8.

I want to say I also hope for some quieter days when I can watch some of my favorite slow-living YouTubers, read some books, and take photographs, but every time I’ve written this in the past, I’ve had a crazy week so I am afraid to jinx it.

I have a few blog posts started and hope to finish them and put them up on the blog this week. I really hope they are more exciting than this post has been today! *wink*

How was your week? Did you do anything fun? Let me know in the comments and visit the blog tomorrow to find out what I have been reading, watching, writing, listening to, and taking photos of.

If you want to follow me on Facebook or Instagram, you can do that by clicking on the words “Facebook” and “Instagram” but you can also just ignore social media and follow me here because social media can often be evil.

Welcome to the Saturday Afternoon Chat where I  . . . um . . . . chat. Ha!

Anyhow, I can’t offer you tea today because I am out of tea! I can offer you some lemonade, water, coffee, chocolate milk or plain, whole, lactose-free milk.

(I do have one tea that my blogging friend Bettie sent me but the cinnamon is a bit overpowering, just to give you a heads up. I’ll still make you some if you want it, though. *wink*)

We had fall temperatures this week and I loved it!

I just wanted to share that with all of you.

On Tuesday it was so nice and cool that I made ham and bean soup and it was seriously so comforting. On Monday Little Miss had some sort of allergy attack or brief illness, but I am guessing it was simply sinus issues because she gets these off and on and allergies have been high in our area. By Wednesday I had the same thing but no fever at all. I’m pretty certain we were all dealing with issues from the weather change, which was from very hot to nice and cool.

On Friday the humidity came back and we have some of that today but the temperature is still in the high 70s, which I am fine with.

Our little allergy attack or whatever, threw our week off a bit but that’s okay because we didn’t have a ton scheduled anyhow. Sadly we didn’t get to go swimming but we hope to later today and also tomorrow.

On Thursday we went to my parents to have lunch with my mom for her birthday. It had to be a quick lunch because I had to take my son back to the town we live in (seven minutes away) for him to get to work and Little Miss back for gymnastics.

Yesterday, The Husband, me, and the kids had lunch out together and then The Husband went grocery shopping while the kids and I sat in the new truck like a bunch of slugs. We didn’t help because The Husband moves fast and we can’t keep up. He’s very efficient and we tend to distract him.

Right now I am sitting on my daughter’s bed writing this blog post because it is one of the coolest rooms upstairs once the air conditioning and fan are on. I really wish the humidity would go away again.

Our cat, Scout, is sitting next to me which is very unusual because she’s normally outside exploring. This is the second day she’s chosen to stay inside and nap so I hope she is okay. She’s a hunter and loves to take down mice, moles, birds, and snakes. Her not doing that has me a little worried, but maybe she’s just catching up on some sleep.

Little Miss says maybe she just wants to hang out with me and I suppose that is a possibility.

This week was a lot slower than other weeks and we needed that.

I was supposed to start a new job next week but found out some very disturbing things about the owners of the magazine I was going to work for so I backed out.

What’s odd is that when I searched up the name of the potential employers at first all I saw were their own sites and anything positive but when I did the same on my phone (to see if there were any former employees who commented on sites about the fairness of their compensation offer) the name of the company with the word scandal came up. It was almost like God wanted me to see the posts and information about the scandal that happened about 9 years ago.

That sent me off down rabbit holes I did not want to go down and eventually led me to someone who had been involved in a very sick situation involving the owners and their family. Once I confirmed the stories were true, I sent an email and withdrew my acceptance of the offer.

It is very sad and sick how people in leadership roles take advantage of others and then act like dark things that happened never happened simply because the individuals don’t want to give up their power and money.

It was disappointing that I wouldn’t have an opportunity to make some extra money as our family really needs it right now, but I could not, in good conscience, work for people who covered up very serious crimes and in some cases perpetrated those crimes.

I’m not really sure I would have made money in the job anyhow with the way the payment structure was set up. Plus, the company was very legalistic in their Christian views and that’s a bit scary for me considering some of my background.

This upcoming week we don’t have anything scheduled but I have planning to do for homeschool and my parents’ 60^th anniversary party in September.

How was your week last week? Anything exciting coming up this week? Let me know in the comments!