treats, tricksters, and over the hill

Happy November! I'm glad to be here, but maybe that's mostly that extra hour talking.

I don't know about y'all, but Halloween here was a BUST, and I've got the bag of leftover candy to show for it. More candy for the examinees in the testing center, looks like.

We had one young family come by, which reminded us that our doorbell is on the fritz. Once I realized they were there, I went out with the candy, but they were moving on to the neighbors. In hindsight, I should've chased them down. From then on, I turned on audible Ring notifications on my phone.

Not long after, I got a  notification and thought, "Oh good, trick-or-treaters!", but no. It was just a neighbor texting, "Where are all the trick-or-treaters??", so it seems it wasn't just us. Another notification popped up shortly after that, once again making me hopeful. But it was this, from yet another neighbor:

So then I thought, "Okay, maybe it's not so bad to experience quiet this Halloween". And that was the sum total of it.

Earlier that day, we'd gone up to traipse around Helms Deep. Chatted a bit with a neighbor while trying to make friends with his very large dog, and did some more work on our road. Weather was fantastic. There's not much shade up there, especially when on the road, so it's nice that it's not so dang hot anymore.

I took some time to explore a bit more as I've yet to do a whole lot of that. The road enters with a deep gulley (where I found those plants that look like marijuana but aren't) on one side and a hilltop on the other. I've snooped around the gulley a bit, but I'd never gone up the hill, so that was my snoop spot on Saturday.

Meego'd been up there and said he'd found a property marker, so I went a-lookin'. 

A view from the "summit", looking southeast. Truck highlighted for scale. That would be Kansas in the great beyond.

I found the property marker and snooped around the adjacent property where there doesn't seem to be much activity. There was once a house there, but it burned in the big fire of 2012. I spotted some concrete pavers and a water spigot as signs of civilization.

The cows have gone home. I kind of miss them.