Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto
Happy Halloween to all
Trick or treat!
I’m sure these ghostly dogs want a treat.
Obviously I was waiting for Halloween to post this picture, but even though I’ve had the picture for a few years now, I kept forgetting about it.
I hope that everyone is having a great Halloween. Are you celebrating?
When Chris and I first bought our house in 2001 we decided to take out a variable interest rate mortgage. I have to say that it’s worked out well for us!
When we first got our house interest rates were at the lowest that they’d been in years, perhaps decades and we locked in for 6 months at something like 2% below prime and then after that it was guaranteed to be half a percent below prime.
Our luck held, probably due to poor economic times throughout this decade and the prime interest rate has stayed relatively low.
Now with the possible economic recession in the US and our own Canadian economy starting to go down the Bank of Canada has lowered the prime interest rate at least three times in the last few weeks. That of course has resulted in our mortgage company lowering our interest rate as well. We’ve received three letters from our Mortgage company in the last two weeks and with each letter our bi-weekly mortgage payments have dropped.
In all our mortgage payments have dropped about $50 a month. That’s not a huge decrease, but it will help.
Have you been experiencing the same thing? Has your mortgage company notified you that your mortgage payments will decrease slightly in the near future? Our rate drop doesn’t take effect until December and unless I’m way off I think the prime rate might drop again!
I still haven’t decided if we’ll be celebrating Halloween at our home tomorrow evening. Most years we decorate the front of the house with Halloween figures and some of that fake spider web stuff, but we didn’t do that this year.
Why? Well .. we’ve never had a dog at Halloween and Midnight barks and jumps around like crazy whenever anyone comes to our porch (mailman) or knocks on the door so I can just imagine how she’ll react when little kids all dressed in their cute Halloween costumes start coming to the door in droves.
I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be scared by the kids in costume, she loves kids, but I’ll bet she’d scare them with her barking and jumping. Plus it will be very tiring for us telling her to stop barking for hours on end and holding on to her collar every time we open the door!
So yeah … we’re thinking of just not participating in Halloween this year. If we don’t, I’ll lock our outside screen door so kids can’t come into the enclosed porch and I’ll close our decorative heavy curtains (that I rarely close) so the house will appear dark.
I really enjoy participating in Halloween and or holding Halloween parties, but with Midnight only being a little over a year old and rather hyper I think it will be easier to just skip Halloween this year.
Do you participate in Halloween every year – handing out candy to the kids or have you skipped it on occasion for some reason?
Earlier today I was startled by a really loud sound. I thought that there had been an accident in front of the house, but when I looked outside I couldn’t see anything unusual. It wasn’t until I took the dog outside to do her business that I noticed a huge bulldozer parked on the side street near our house. I guess a material handling company must have dropped it off earlier – probably when I heard the loud noise.
I’ll be that it’s going to be really noisy around here tomorrow when that big machine starts doing whatever it’s here to do. I hope they aren’t going to dig up the sidewalks again. The last two times they’ve done that (in the 7 years we’ve lived here!) it was for upgrades to the water pipe and gas pipe systems.
Yesterday afternoon I heard a really loud noise too. I happened just as I was looking outside, noticing how windy it was and that one of our neighbors garbage cans was on the sidewalk ready to roll out into the road if it got any windier and Boom … there was a loud crash and a rolling thunder type noise in our driveway.
It turned out to have been caused by our neighbors large recycling container falling over in the wind and rolling halfway down the driveway. Man those things can make some noise when they fall over!
The driveway is like a wind tunnel in the winter. I sure hope that that noise isn’t going to be a daily occurrence!
Have you been startled by any loud noises in your neighborhood lately? If you are having wind like we are having (and we had snow flurries yesterday and today too! Sob!) I’ll bet you’ve heard some odd noises.
Do you ever have one of those days when you just feel … bleh? That’s the way I’m feeling today. Actually it started last night.
As many of you know I have Crohn’s so I’m not sure if my Crohn’s is just acting up more than usual or if I’m fighting a flu bug or something. Last night I started feeling weak and shaky and feverish (but the feverish part is nothing new, it goes with my version of Crohns). Today I’ve got bad stomach cramps and I just don’t feel up to doing much of anything.
It’s not like I don’t have tons of things to do … but I just can’t work up the energy to do much of anything at all.
So I’m just spending the evening watching TV for now. Speaking of TV did you catch this evenings NCIS? It was a creepy Halloween type episode. I also watched yesterdays episode of Heroes that we’d taped. I guess it will be a TV night. I’ll rest up and hopefully feel a little more like myself tomorrow.