Our first snow shovel

Ok, ok. We finally did it! We were in Zellers today buying storage units reduced from $29.99 to $9.99. Can someone please tell me why, when you move to a smaller house, you end up buying more stuff? I need to buy more stuff to store the stuff I had in the larger house. I’m also continuing to get rid of stuff, but we still have so much stuff.

So, we were in Zellers (similar to Target) and Eric bought a red snow shovel. So, we are ready to shovel the driveway and front step. This is the first time either one of us has owned a shovel. We’ve noticed the bags of salt appearing in the store also.

The temperature is dropping from a summery 20 (72F) to a high today of 3 (35F). I told Eric it would be like flipping a switch when the temperature changed. The sky is starting to look more wintry with interesting clouds. There are still lots of autumn leaves, but I didn’t see that much red this year, probably because it was so warm.

One day last week there was frost on the car, and Eric scraped it, and thought that was fun. A couple of days later when we were taking the kids to school there was a light layer of ice on the car, and we had to scrape harder (less fun this time), and the sliding side doors had frozen shut – oh come on, it wasn’t even that cold! Our neighbour came out of his house, and with a few expert brush strokes, he was in his car smiling benevolently at us and was gone. There’s us with the Florida plates on our car, still trying to figure it out. So, kids entered the car from the front and crawled over the seats to the back, since the doors were stuck fast. Oh, I know, perhaps one should warm the car first before opening the automatic doors. Someone told me to put WD 40 on the door seals so moisture would not freeze the doors stuck. Do we do this every day, or just once in a while? During the drive to school the warning lights finally came on because the doors must have just unstuck, so we had to pull over to the side of the road and open and shut all our doors. You never know what those crazy Florida people are going to do next.

Monday we are taking the car to Canadian tire to have it modified. We have to have “daytime running lights” and a couple of other things. The fellow at Canadian Tire said we don’t need a heater block (to plug the car in at night to keep it warm) because it is too warm here in Southern Ontario.

After the car is modified we will go and get our Ontario driver license (reciprocal so we don’t have to take a test) and get our insurance and Ontario plates. Last week Eric went to Service Canada and got his Social Insurance Number (like a social security number). Fun. Our days are still filled with odd chores.