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With Halloween mostly cleaned up, it was time for me to get to the second wave of leaves.
So I got out the rake, the leaf bags, the leaf blower and the Leaf Vac.
I had the Leaf Vac tuned up earlier this Fall. It Started right up and ran like a top. It turns out that the condition the leaves are in today is perfect for the Leaf Vacuum. They were dry enough to get sucked right up. However, they were also very thick, which was not great for the Vac.
So there was raking involved as well. I was out there for about three hours and I went from this...
to this...
And now I'm happy.
There are still a bunch of leaves in the street. The deal is that the leaves that fall in the street are the responsibility of the city. However, it takes them forever to get around to it. I'm always afraid that it will snow before the city comes by.
So I decided to be a helper. Sometime in the middle of last week, the Parks Department people showed up and blew all the leaves in the park into several piles. One is conveniently located just across the street from me.
So, as a helper, I decided to pile the leaves into my wheel barrow and transfer them to the city pile. I got one whole side of my parking strip cleaned up. But then, it was three o'clock and I had worked enough.
Anyway, I will take more over unless the Parks people come back to get their leaves.
We're getting too old for this.
The video above shows the yard after we had everything set up. I took it about 4:30 and amazingly, we were ready to go. Our many thanks go out to Randy, Bob, Mark, Ron, Kelly, Rob and Kyle. Without the help of these fabulous friends, we could never pull this off.
We don't have very good statistics for this year but I would estimate we had somewhere around 1500 people (mostly kids) come to the door. Our first Trick or Treaters showed up just before 4:00 and we shut everything down at 8:30.
We still have candy left over but it's good stuff. We managed to get rid of the 500 Twizzlers we had from last year.
I took the day off to get everything ready and Susan took half a day. Randy, Kelly and Rob showed up early and we got a lot of stuff set up quickly.
The pallets that Susan had me attach shelves to worked out great and we'll be using those again. The pumpkins all looked great.
Here's my favorite pumpkin that I carved this year. If you can't figure it out, you're too young.
Susan carved her traditional cat pumpkin and once again, it came out perfect.
To revisit my original thought at the top of the post, we are getting to a point where we cannot keep this going much longer. It takes a lot of energy to set up and manage.
By the time we shut down, I was completely drained. I'm still very sore this morning. I think that is an indication of the kind of shape I'm in more than anything else.
I'm happy to say Halloween is behind us. Now for the clean up.
