Memo, Mail & Me: It's Monday October 30th

And here we are again, arriving at Monday.  Good morning all.

The burning bush is glowing in the season's finale

Most of our chipmunks have received the memo from Mother Nature that these are the last days to gather food stores for the winter.  Chipmunks don't hibernate in the true sense of the word.  What they do is called torpor, which means they slow down in their breathing, heart rate & metabolism but do stay underground in their burrows for the winter, so hence the need to gather enough food to see them through November to March.  This is a photo of Arnold, he lives under this wooden barrel which I use as a compost container.

Our mail box was over flowing this week with very colourful grocery store flyers from 5 of the 7 stores.  Lots of pretty pictures of yummy food.  None of these 7 stores are local to me, I need to drive into the city 20 minutes away.  I use to read all these flyers thoroughly, marking all the deals & then driving from one corner of the city to the other (7 in total) to take advantage of any sale price.  But one day I realized something.  I was not saving anything.  It would add about 45-60 minutes to my shopping routine & my time is valuable; I put lots of extra kilometers on the car because none of these shops were close to each other, which translates into added gas usage.   Now I just choose two stores which are fairly close together & plan my other errands around these locations.  Both are doing comparison matching, which means if I take the flyer to the store that maybe doesn't have the sale on a particular item but one of the other shops does, I just present the flyer/item to the cashier & they then match the price.  What about you, do you have a favourite grocery store? 

Not sure if it's the weather change, but the fur girls are quite busy, running about the house at the oddest of hours.  Plus I swear these cats have mountain goat in them,  we are finding them up on top of the bookcases in the family room & "war room".  There's no fighting taking place in the "war room" it's called this because of all Mr Man's war books, which number over a thousand,  contained in 7 bookcases.
 

Smokey Puss - who loves tissue paper to play in

Sooty Paws, who seems to love trouble

On the me front, last Monday on my way into work, I tripped at the entrance, landing head first on the cement walk way.  I so scared myself that I just lay there to be sure nothing was broken when a lady who was driving by, saw what happened, pulled a U-turn & came to help me up.  I cracked my head pretty hard & had an immediate goose egg, cement burn (scrape) nasty headache &  skinned knees.  It happened so quickly I didn't even have time to put out my hands to brace myself.  I called Mr Man to come & get me to take me to our doctor's to be check out.   I do not (thankfully) have a concussion but head trauma (the swelling) & lateral whiplash, which translate to when I fell I jarred my shoulder & neck.  Now I get to be a patient at the clinic I work at.  Let me tell you, several of them need to take a sensitivity workshop.  The RMT told me "oh well, it could have been worse".  Yes you are right, it could have been, but really you tell patients that are injured & hurting this?  Another staff member said "oh I can't see the goose egg - I guess you're ok now".    On the boss front - I told him as soon as it happened but he has yet to call to see how I'm doing! 

Autumn shows us how lovely it can be to let things go ...