Fun Times!

Life has been pretty busy lately! Our community participated in the 4th Annual Mount Holly Lantern Parade, so for the past several months we have been constructing lanterns. Minion lanterns, to be exact. We made two large minions, four smaller minions and a handful of bananas. We coordinated with the art class of the Mount Holly Middle School, and the kids made an additional 40 or 50 small minion lanterns. 

The initial construction was wire and duct tape, to which we added mini light strands. This was covered with a shell of translucent white paper, and then topped with colored construction paper. It was a process, to say the least. The parade theme was "Let's All Go to the Movies", and at first I was unsure of doing minions. I'll confess I knew nothing about the characters, so I had to sit down and watch one of the movies. I have to say, the minions were a hug crowd-pleaser. The judges took note of this, and we ended up winning first place in the "Group" category. Not bad for our first rodeo! It was a blast to walk in the parade with the kids. The adults wore yellow shirts, blue suspenders and yellow hard hats, and all of our group wore minion face masks. Those were a great way to ensure mask compliance. I added a unique touch to our costumes by making minion glasses out of canning jar rims.

The theme for next year is "Written in the Stars", which sounds very broad. Our group is getting together tomorrow night to begin planning our entry. The pressure is on since we took 1st this year.

Minion Mania!

We took a quick overnight drive up to Blowing Rock, NC on October 26th to photograph the fall color. We sure found some nice foliage! The previous two Octobers here the colors were virtually non-existent. It did our Midwest hearts good to see the pretty reds and oranges this year.

finding fall

  
On October 30th Imagery had a Halloween Pet Parade. There were two categories - cutest and best matched. We don't have a dog right now, but we sure enjoyed photographing the event. The parade was followed by a demonstration of the K-9 unit of the Mount Holly police department.

pet parade

On Halloween, the Lifestyle Director brought a band in to perform in the afternoon. The weather was perfect for us to be outside listening to some great music. Jim and I reprised our minion costumes as we knew our lanterns were going to be out on display. We never got a good picture of us the day of the parade, so we were able to rectify that on Sunday.

Minions 'R Us

Tuesday was such a pretty day that we decided to take our kayaks out on Mountain Island Lake. We found some beautiful color along the shoreline as we paddled along, and even startled a blue heron who was napping in the afternoon sunlight. As the weather has since turned rainy and chilly, I'm glad we took advantage of the day. 

Mountain Island Lake

Life Goes On

Thursday was my turn to go to Harris Teeters, the local grocery store. As I mentioned before, we shop for groceries once a week, but only one of us actually makes the trip. We takes turns to minimize the risk. This trip was a big one because I scored not only our preferred loaf of bread for the first time since isolation began last month, but also a bottle of Clorox disinfecting spray. There was still no toilet paper in stock however. We don't need it, but it has become a game to me to see if I can ever find any.

We have been working on small projects around the house. Jim organized his boxes in the garage, installed pull out drawers in the kitchen cabinets, put up gutter guards, etc. I lined shelves with lightweight acrylic sheets to stop things from sliding through the cheap shelving units the builder installed here. I have also continued with my mask making project, worked on taxes and better organized my filing system. Exciting stuff, right?

Last night we sat out back with two other couples to enjoy the beautiful evening. As before we each had our own chairs and drinks, and kept the 6' distance between each couple. It is always nice to hear how other people are coping with the coronavirus mandates, and just to have new conversations.

Today after Jim finished the gutters and I completed three more masks, we decided to get out of here for awhile. We drove to the University of North Carolina-Charlotte campus to walk through their gardens. We had been earlier this year with our hiking club, and have been wanting to go back. One of the things I miss most about St. Louis, after family and friends, is the Missouri Botanical Garden. There just aren't that many gardens around here, so today's outing gave me an opportunity to photograph flowers and trees while getting my exercise.

With the Stay at Home order we are allowed to be outside to exercise, and in fact the campus garden had signs posted about COVID-19. There were to be no more than 3 people in a group, and we were to keep the 6' distance between us and others. I will say, sadly, those things did not happen. It was a beautiful day in the low 70s, so the place was crowded with groups. Children were running around and blocking the narrow paths, so keeping a distance was a challenge. We just ended up going to a part of the garden that was unpopulated so we could work on our photography. It was so good to have a change of scenery!

UNCC botanical garden

We grilled steaks when we got home, and ate on the back patio. Then we sat in our orange chairs to watch the boaters go by. We even had a bluebird stop by, and a blue heron was across the lake. It was a nice ending to a wonderful day.

bluebird and blue heron