Catching up for the first week of November

Here I am again, catching you up on what's been going on at our place.

About a week ago, during our first snowfall, the storage unit where Little Sweetie is being kept for the winter had to do repairs on the door. That meant I needed to go into Soldotna and pull the car out of their way. I finally got to take some pictures of him after his repairs. He's lookin' good. No more Head Wound Harry.

Our bird feeders are still bringing us a lot of delight (I do love chickadees)...

... Even the "robbers" like magpies and this woodpecker:

I taught my first class in Alaska for the Back To Basics group, on cookie decorating. I had a huge class, so I didn't get to cover much material, but I did show them how to assemble a graham cracker house in the fastest way possible (go here to see the tutorial) and how to do basic decorating. I didn't take a single picture during the class, so all I have is this picture of the model I made for the students to see:
My craft stuff is still mostly in storage so I used a cake pan as a container. I'm not sure anyone noticed that's what it was. I also didn't count the students, but I had 29 people RSVP'ed for it and we used six banquet tables to hold everyone, so I think we actually did have that many, or close to it.

Someone unknown to us posted a video of James' performance with the other young men at O'Flaherty's two weeks ago, and I'll give you the link here so you can see him for yourselves. There are three fiddlers in this group, and James is the right-hand fiddler, in the beige shirt. He has a solo at 42 seconds in, so click here and see it.

Our weather has been yo-yoing between balmy 40s and chilly 20s. We've had ice on the lake, and lost the ice on the lake. Here's some ice:

This is the way the ice looked when we got up this morning. Click to see how far it is between the bare tree and the spruce:
Three hours later, when we got home from errands, this is how much more ice we had:

Meanwhile, indoors, the house is being fixed up for Big Jim and Mary's visit over Thanksgiving weekend. The main project is the tile surround for the wood stove. Jim's got the floor tiles in and waiting to be grouted, and is tiling the heat shield tonight. Then we can put the stove back and use it again. Doesn't it look pretty already? The floor tile is a dark gray. When it's all done, I'll post a nice picture of the whole thing.
I suppose that catches you up on what's happening here. Write to me and tell me what's going on where you are, okay?