Battening Down the Hatches

One of my duties today included taking down our homemade lighted spider Halloween decoration, in order to give the orange lights on the house and in the trees a more festive, harvest feel. For me, the dismantling of the wire-frame spider that hangs on the side of our house is a harbinger of doom. Or at least winter.

Because we are firmly in the caste of suburban goofballs who have tons of excess folderol in their yards in order to tout their middle-class status, there is a lot of battening down of the hatches once winter menaces on the horizon. Today, in addition to the spider, I put the following into winter storage:

• An all-metal miniature tricycle bearing a tin we're supposed to plant flowers in but haven't yet in the two years we've had it. This resides in the flower bed on one side of the stoop.
• A plastic faux-ceramic statue of two kids swinging in a hammock. This resides in the flower be on the other side of the stoop.
• One river rock in which our name has been sandblasted. This resides on the stoop itself. One of these days I'm going to exchange it with the McNabb's sandblasted rock next door.
• One hunk of pink whateverstone, which was taken from the ruins of the burned-down Spori Building on the Ricks College campus. This also resides on the stoop.
• Other various sundry rocks, including a bit of lava I pulled out of the desert. They all lump together on the stoop.

All that stuff is now safely ensconsed in our shed, which is probably going to explode from all the crap we've got stored in there. As for the stoop, it's looking a bit bare, but the stuff there will soon be replaced by a snow shovel and a small bucket of ice melt that the incontinent dog next door will again likely use as a wee-spot.