I’ve been off the last two weeks – use it or lose it vacation time – and I’m now back to work😊 Didn’t really do all that much; mainly travelling back and forth to the St. Thomas recycle centre – yup, got up to 73 bags of leaves😊 Got to take out the John Deere for a couple of runs to sweep up the leaves … and then bag them. We had a couple of birthdays – Kelly on the 4th, and myself on the 6th; I’m officially now retirement age even though I’ll probably still be working for the next five years or so. Might as well work – what with the Omicron variant of COVID-19 it’s making it too hard to travel. They keep changing the rules and restrictions and everyone is pretty much confused – so, might be staying home for a while. Going to Mexico in January is up in the air … not sure if we will cancel or not. The way I look at it COVID and Omicron will never go away completely and we are both double vaxxed and getting the booster shot next week so we might as well go. The weather has been pretty weird – cold days and snow followed by 14 degrees and sunny. …And wind, this past Saturday we had gusts of over 120kph (about 75 mph) and lots of power outages – but not us, thank god. Though horrible tornadoes in Kentucky … over 80 dead and several towns destroyed ☹ Doug the Dog is still acting crazy … doesn’t matter if it’s snow on the ground or green grass … he runs around in circles around the backyard patio scaring off the birds 😊 … Birds … we have lots of birds; blue jays, cardinals, humming birds, sparrows – even a red crested woodpecker that come in for breakfast every morning. Kelly filled up three bird feeders and two seed bells that hang from our tree by the patio. Every morning there’s about a dozen assorted birds feeding that we can watch from the kitchen window 😊. The cows across the way have left the building … uh, relocated to a new location – probably the meat section at the local grocery ☹ There’s a few sheep over there now – but no where near as sociable as the cows were … and these guys are baaaaaad … and I had just learned to speak cow … guess it’s time to mooooove on ☹. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had beef steaks, burgers, roasts, and stews in honour to the cows (I named my favorite one Chuck); lots of pasta – tagliatelle with meat sauce, a seven pound lasagna made from scratch; soups; curries … lots of good, homemade meals!! 😊 On the Netflix front we finished watching the finale of ‘Money Heist’ – the most watched non-English tv series in the world – it was fantastic!! … And I think they left a hint at the end that this might not be the end after all! … Almost like ‘Border Town’ – that was supposed to be finished but they came up with a two hour movie called ‘The Mural Murders’ – pretty good stuff 😊. I binge watched ‘Snabba Cash’ – a crime series about drug gangs in Sweden – not too bad. Season 4 of another Swedish series starts today – ‘Bonus Family’. So, Spanish, Finnish, and Swedish; pretty good mixture of languages. If you want to learn a language check out my links to language courses - there's some pretty good deals on this month! Kelly and I have started watching ‘Justified’ on CTV Throwback, not too bad but we’ve put it on hold in order to watch Christmas movies; ‘Father Christmas Is Back’ – absolutely horrible; ‘A Castle For Christmas’ – a little cheesy, but not bad; and ‘My Christmas Inn’ – not bad but hard to believe it’s supposed to be in Alaska! We’ll check out a few more in the next week or so. On to golf … nothing happening until January. NFL football is in it’s fourteenth week … my Seahawks have won their last two … although with a 5 – 8 record there’s not much chance that they will make the playoffs this year … they will have to win out just to have a winning season☹ … In hockey Seattle Kraken still in last place in their division –Maple Leafs tied in first 😊 Got to go … getting back to work but should be a slow week… and I might be able to bag some more leaves … have a great and safe week … we will see you in a bit!!