Halloween

We went to Ben's school today to enjoy the Halloween festivities and then into Saranac Lake for the all-important hunting/gathering of sugary foodstuffs...


Here's Ben facing off with his friend Joseph, both of them ninjas...Ben was a flame-ninja, and Joseph was a shadow-ninja...


The entire Kindergarten class was very excited, about Halloween and costumes and having parents around...


They eventually lined up outside to prepare for the World Famous Lake Clear Elementary Halloween Parade...


The entire school, all 50-something student (K-3), parade around the field, showing off their costumes while frenzied parents record each step with video and still cameras...Ben is the second to last kid in the line, just in front of his friend David, who was dressed as a power-ranger...


Here you can see Ben (flame-ninja walking next to the grown-up, his teacher, Mrs. Peterson), just in front of David, and behind a walk-on princess, who is the sister of one of Ben's classmates...


There were numerous walk-ons in the parade, mostly younger relatives of students at Lake Clear Elementary School, including the stylish (and very short, he's not just far away) pirate, who completed laps along with the other kids in the parade, just a bit faster, so he was never walking with the same kids for long...


After the parade, we went back into the school and the kids sang some seasonal songs for us before gorging lightly on some Halloween goodies...


The next stop on the Benjamin-Gibson-Sheffield-Halloween-Fun-Express was the village of Saranac Lake, which closes off the streets in town every Halloween, so that people can go trick-or-treating all through the town without worrying about getting trick-or-trucked...although it may look like a cloud of pure evil hanging over Ben's shoulder, it's actually his mother in an ultra creepy costume...

Ben gets to see and hang out with all of his friends...all of the local businesses love having the kids (and their parents) stop by...we avoid the drive-stravaganza that the excessively rural nature of Upstate New York makes trick-or-treating from house to house...


Ben started out shy and scared and intimidated by the people and the practices of Halloween in town, but he soon warmed up to the routine, and had a fun time filling his booty-bag...


We ran into lots of friends and acquaintances while cruising around town, including Joseph and his little brother Benjamin...

We got home with as much candy as we could carry, ate too much before our supper, and all have pleasantly aching bellies...Halloween is a great holiday, but I'm thankful it just comes around once a year...

Cold and Rainy...Finally

Saturday we were supposed to be hosting a Halloween Geocaching event, but the weather was too nasty (for the second year in a row) to subject people to an outside party, so it was, sadly, canceled...


We started off the morning with a couple of games of, "Speedy Eddy" a game about snails racing through a garden. There are carrots that can bonk you, causing you to lose a turn, tempting lettuce patches that delay you until you roll doubles, windstorms that separate your player from their shell (which slows you down a lot, until you get them back together), secret tunnels to shoot you forward and back, and lucky clover patches that allow you to roll again...all in all a great game, just right for little guys and sleepy dads...until your 5-year-old alters the rules for Halloween, and then it's hard to keep everything straight before coffee...the board, pieces, and dice are all made from wood...old school...


Once we got our morning straightened out, and decided on a plan of action (other than hanging out by the wood stove downstairs), we made a beeline for "Woods" (actually known as "The Long Lake Diner") for an early lunch...


Ben was incredibly excited about "FREE DESSERT!!!", which we didn't understand until he pointed out the lollipops on the way out...


Our next stop was the Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake, which like every museum worth its salt, has a really big chair out front for kids to climb on in the rain...


The ADK Museum is a great museum focusing on the history of our region that Ben is finally old enough to enjoy and understand...they have a great collection of boats, powered and paddled, including this super-cool boat with a canopied "chamber"...


The exhibit on logging, which is an incredibly important part of Adirondack History, is phenomenal, and included some fun new stuff to get kids involved in learning about how the woods were harvested...


This portion of the logging exhibit, focusing on the logging camps, is a favorite of mine because the stove pictured here was donated from the (Pretty) "Great Camp" that I lived in during the summers of my childhood...this stove lived in the huge old kitchen of the main building of our camp, and in my lifetime was only used to heat the cavernous space on cold mornings, not to cook our meals; although it was used in that capacity during my father's childhood...

The ADK museum used to have signage saying that the stove came from a logging camp, but they have now changed it to say that a stove like this one could have been at a logging camp...I had a talk one day with a docent about the stove's history and design (they've removed/painted over some of the chromed detail work on the stove's front, it was/is too fancy for a logging camp stove)...I don't know if the signage was changed as a result of my harassing the docent, but I like to think so...


The ADK Museum has recently added a bunch of kid-friendly "Touch Me" manipulatives that go along with their exhibits that can help kids better understand the things that they are seeing...Ben loved playing with these farm implements, especially the butter-churn and this bucket-yoke...

Gail and Ben loved the old and handmade toys...Ben couldn't believe that someone had made all of those tiny and intricate pieces by hand, but loved looking at them and trying to guess what some of the more esoteric things were...



We had a great, if wet, view of Blue Mountain Lake from the observation deck down by the "Woods and Waters" exhibit (maybe my favorite in the whole museum)...


Ben was entranced by the Adirondack Hermit's cabin...Noah John Rondeau lived most of his life alone and out in the woods as a squatter/hermit in various places in the deep wilderness areas of the Adirondacks, and after he died, his cabin was moved to the Museum from a spot about 25 miles away...

You can see his bed in the far end of the cabin, it was rough living and the first thing that Ben remarked on was the low ceiling and door (Ben could walk in, but any taller, and you would have to stoop), I assume that was to make it more heat-efficient)...



In this picture, you can see the woodstove that he used for heat ing and cooking...across the cabin, on the other side of the door opening, there was a table/cutting surface and a couple of plates and cups and some silverware...


This finial picture of the cabin shows a statue of Noah John Rondeau that a local woodcarver make that is roughly life-sized (which gives you an idea about the size of the cabin, especially since he was a pretty tiny guy)...

In the background you can see a bunch of trees arranged tee-pee style, which I learned (when I read a biography of Rondeau a few years ago) was his clever innovation for firewood...he would cut down trees in the Spring, and then limb them and notch them before stacking them this way to dry for the winter...by notching the trees at stove length-ed intervals with his ax, he could easily break them in the winter and have dried wood in the proper length without having to stack cords and cords of wood under a roof he would have had to build for himself...

A great visit to a great museum!!!

Pumpkin Fieldtest

We set up "Mr. No-Brains-Scary-Face" outside on the deck during out supper, and towards the end, I lit the candle inside his hollowed-out skull cavity, and turned off the lights in the dining area...he's a bit off center, but aren't we all at Casa Sheffield at the end of a long weekend...

La-La, Gran, and Muz!!!

La-La flew in from Maine this weekend, as you will see in the pictures that follow. In addition, Gail's mom, "Gran", celebrated her birthday on Saturday; and My mother, "Muz", celebrates her birthday today. Both birthday girls are at the top of their games, and getting good press to prove it...

Janet (Gran)is finishing a run in a play at the Community Little Theater, and has been recently lauded in the Sun Journal...

Jill (Muz) has just successfully finished organizing and running the Women Deliver Conference in London, and had a profile in this month's edition of The Lancet...





La-La and Ben played Friday afternoon away, including Ben dressing in his Halloween costume for a while...




One of Ben's stuffed dinosaurs got out of his room, and freaked Cedar out a bit...Cedar kept being surprised by the T-rex throughout the afternoon, as it kept moving around the house...




Due to a big week or the excitement of La-La's visit...Ben asked to be excused from supper early, and fell asleep at 6:30...






The next day, Mommy had to present to the PSC Board, so we showed Ben's school off to La-La, and then went over to PSC to meet Mommy after the meeting...here are La-La and Ben outside of the new-ish library...




We had to wait a bit for the board meeting to break, so Ben hopped onto the internet, accessed his iGoogle page, and played some games at some of the great kids' websites we've found over the years...




After we picked up Mommy, we went to the Wild Center, a great and somewhat new natural history museum in Tupper Lake...here you can see Ben playing with/in a fog machine that is a part of an exhibit teaching visitors about the unique environment in the High Peaks...



Ben took a look at a praying mantis laying eggs, something none of us had ever seen (or even thought about...I had previously never looked at anything behind their creepy head and hands combo)...





After looking around inside for awhile, we went for a short nature hike on the grounds, and Ben really got into the interpretive signage for the first time...




I saw this rock in the woods about 35 feet off of the trail, and just knew that there was something weird/wrong with it, so while Gail and Ben and La-La looked on with curious stares, I went over and was proven right...it is a fake rock hiding a geocache...I didn't know it was there before the visit, geocaching has simply trained me to pay more attention to the environment that I am moving through, and this rock seemed weird...





Ben sitting in front of the Wild Center's bank of solar cells towards the end of our walk...goofy looks are par for the course when his La-La is around...



Case in point (see above re: goofy looks)...it was a pretty nice picture except for "Pirate Ben" YARRGGHH-ing for the camera...




La-La and Ben put together a very tough puzzle made up of cubes with different pictures on each side in a hands-on room for kids and school-groups...




We were lucky to be just in time for a animal-rehabilitation presentation, and got to see, and learn about, this great little screech owl that had had its wing damaged...




Unlike the last time we were here, this bird was tiny...7 ounces of fluff and claws and big searching eyes...neat to see, and great to learn about in this manner...





Ben and La-La can be (sorta) seen in the foreground of this picture that I took during the movie, "Ride of the Mergansers", a short film about baby mergansers leaping from their nests (shot to the classical piece, "The Flight of the Valkyries"...which always makes me think of "Apocalypse Now")...



This morning was clear and blue, so we decided to take a hike, and to bring Cedar along...because it is the first day of big-game hunting season in our part of the world, we all wore our safety vests...even Cedar...




It was a gorgeous walk along an abandoned rail-bed, we saw and heard lots of wildlife, but no deer or hunters...





There were lots of creeks and rills and rivers all around us, and we stopped at this great bridge to enjoy the open space, the great noises from the busy river (we got over an inch of rain on Friday night), and the smells of water and woods and rotting logs...





Ben loved this plant enough to ask me to take a picture of it...the one he liked is the simple club moss (also called "running ground pine") that is green with candelabra-things poking up...you can also see reindeer lichen and wintergreen in the picture...





Ben found 2 railroad spikes during our walk, one with a wedge-like point, and this one, which had a 4-faced point, like the pyramids...leftovers from the days when there were railroad tracks here...




We also found a bunch of interesting poop...lots of carnivore poop laden with hair and fur...this great sample also had bone and tooth fragments in it...we took it apart with a stick to see what was inside it...




When we got home from our walk, we picked one of our pumpkins to carve...Ben was excited...




He drew out the plan on our newsprint table-cover...a novel design with one eye square and the other triangular...2 teeth up and 2 down in a happy (yet very scary) smile/grimace...




He and Mommy drew the face on the pumpkin and I did the surgery...I'm a big fan of flexible and serrated knives...we have a set of IKEA knives that meet our needs perfectly...



Ben and Mommy had lots of (too much?) fun scooping the goo out of the skull of "Mr. No-Brains-Scary-Face"...





Ben and La-La (pictured here in a borrowed t-shirt so that she wouldn't have to travel wearing pumpkin guts) went through the innards separating the goo from the seeds, so that we could roast and eat them later...




After we were done with the evisceration and facial reconstruction, La-La and Ben worked on some of his homework before La-La had to leave...

It was a great weekend and visit, we're now watching some football and playing with gazillions of stuffed animals on the floor downstairs, and Mommy is about to head upstairs to start work on her never-the-same-twice-but-always-super mac 'n' cheese...

YAY WEEKENDS!