Trees, a new cat, and back to normal life...

So I'm finally done with my "job".  In the 16 days that we were open, we voted over 9,500 people at our little polling place.  The turn-out was record breaking and my weary body felt it! I'm very glad to be able to get back to my normal life. 

I would like to point out that of the 13 people that worked at the polling place (and we all worked almost every day all day) none of us got sick.  I was praying hard that we would all be protected. I think we were all praying that prayer!

We wore masks and gloves (and some of the older people wore face shields) and 99% of the people that came in wore masks as well.  We issued each voter a q-tip to use the touch screen voting machines so we wouldn't have to wipe down the machine between each voter. Everything worked very smoothly and based on everything I saw on the local Facebook page everyone was pleased with how smooth voting went.  

The only problem we encountered  was that our county didn't buy "I Voted" stickers this year - instead we were giving out "I Voted" pens so people wouldn't have to share pens.  The pens were back-ordered and by the time they came in over half of the people had already voted.  (And because we didn't have pens to give out, we had to sanitize the pens between use.  UGH!)

I heard, "you don't have stickers?" hundreds of times each day and it got old.  Apparently, if you can't post a selfie with your "I Voted" sticker you didn't really vote.  

Enough about voting.  What else has been going on in the last couple of weeks?

One of the 100-year-old pecan trees in my mom's yard fell over during the hurricane that blew through.  I got a text about it from Sarah while I was working.  (The kids were out of school because of the storm.) I almost started crying when I saw the pictures.  

She has four beautiful pecan trees in her yard and (obviously since they are over 100 years old) they've been there my whole life. Even though I was sad about the trees (the one that fell, landed on one of the other ones and it had to be removed as well) I was extremely thankfully that it fell the way it did.  It could have just as easily fallen on my mom's house or on our side driveway where the kids park their cars.

In other news, on November 1st, I got a text from my brother that said there was a gray cat on their porch but that it ran towards our house. I looked for it but couldn't find it. The next day though, Peter spotted it on our back patio but it ran away when he went outside. We spotted it several times over the next week and I finally broke down and fed it.  It didn't appear to be going anywhere and it also didn't appear to be eating very much.  

And you know what happens when you start feeding a stray cat....

So I took it to the vet on Monday and she was treated for ear mites, fleas, and worms and was given rabies shot and vaccines and now we have a new cat.

He's really pretty and very sweet....

And Kitten hates him with a passion.  This picture looks very sweet but there was a lot of growling and hissing going on that you can't see in the picture. And last night we were awoken by horrible cat screams and fighting cats. Cat screams are terrifying in the middle of the night, by the way.

We are still trying to find the perfect name for the cat but no luck yet.

The kids are out of school for Veteran's Day today.  Sarah starts swim team workouts tomorrow and Peter starts football workouts as well.  Dan and I are headed to Georgia this weekend for a wedding and life is just rolling on along.  I hope to post more regularly now that I'm free from my civic duties but we all know how that goes...

Also, as a side note - the menopause hot flashes are about to do me in so anyone with any suggestions on how to get rid of them, please drop them in the comments!