Late October and the Christmas Fairs are starting. And then it's suddenly November!

A lot of community events on the island are organized to raise money. Could be funding for a school trip, hospital equipment, parks, buildings, you name it. Today was the first Christmas Fair event to raise money for the Mindemoya hospital. I volunteered. Served soup and sandwiches and then helped with the clean up. I had a really good time talking to people from our township and others.
Now that the colder weather is here, we have been using the woodstove almost all the time. We still had some aged wood left from the previous owner, but soon we will have to start burning that  fresh wood that we cut in late June.  Tried some pieces of maple and those were fine. Tonight we tried a piece of red oak. Burnt perfectly, with impressive secondary burn. One problem though; it's 4C outside, not -10 or lower. Our windows are open.
Just for fun, here some pictures taken in the past week or so of guys having fire practice and a certain dog playing ball in leaves.

Halloween came and went and the stores started to put the first Christmas stuff on sale. One store had the  lights on sale and we quickly started to haul all ours up from the crawl space and hang them in order to see how many more we were going to need. The house is smaller than our  old house, but has more frontage. So here we were, earlier than ever, decorating the house for Christmas!

And then you look at the weather, sunny and relatively warm, and half plus a bit of the porch decorated, and enough lights and garlands to finish it after a trip to the hardware store, and you think "I may as well finish it". And so we did. To not turn the lights on once they're up is pure torture!
On November 9 we had our first significant snow and took these goofy pictures.

Yes, there really is a chair at the top of the property. Overnight we had more snow and Dave and Cheryl came over for a walk.

 Next day was Remembrance Day and there was a potluck brunch in the community centre at 11:30 after all the ceremonies were finished. We found out that as part of the commemoration bells would be ringing at sunset all over the island and we volunteered for this. Here a link to the Bell ringing that tells it all in more detail.


Needless to say that, now that we have even more snow and it's pretty dark at 5, the lights are on.