Merry Halloween!

Our first snow came a little early this year.

In fact, I read in our paper that the last time a measurable amount of snow hit our area in October was 1925.  But then, this year we have had tornados, crazy flooding, and an earthquake, so really, who wouldn’t expect a nor’easter to hit in October?

Ben and his friend Nathan went into business and shoveled neighbors’ driveways.  They didn’t set a fee, but most neighbors gave them a little something and they both earned over $30 by the end of the day!  And Ben slept really really well Saturday night.

Maddie built a snowman and put her pumpkin to good use as the snowman’s head!

Maddie is trying to use the slide to roll the second ball up onto the first ball. 

Daddy to the rescue!

Jack looked at snowflakes with his magnifying lens and basically went in and out of the house 53 times, requiring many pairs of gloves, hats, and socks, and multiple  mugs of cocoa.

(Note that he put his hat and a pair of earmuffs on over his hood…)

By the next day some of the snow had melted enough that we were still able to enjoy our annual neighborhood Halloween party, and tonight we will be trick-or-treating!

But I still feel like Mother Nature decided to pull an October Fool’s Joke on us. 

Pumpkin Pumpkin

Even though we bought our pumpkins in late September, we waited until now to do the carving so we wouldn’t have a big slimy mess of rotten pumpkin seeds and decaying, blackened rinds decorating our front porch.  Jack found this hard to understand and asked me at least twice a week, and more frequently as Halloween approached, When Just When Are We Going To Carve Our Pumpkins, Mom, Pleeeease!?

I surprised all of them after school on Wednesday, announcing that  no after school activities +  gorgeous weather +  we are within a week of Halloween = PUMPKIN CARVING TIME!

Everyone was excited!  (Except Ben who thinks carving pumpkins is icky.  He likes to design his but leaves the cleaning and carving to us.  He has always been this way, and I’ve learned to accept it.  Mostly.)

We always roast our pumpkin seeds and snack on them all evening and this year was no exception.  There were so many seeds we even have leftovers!

How we roast pumpkin seeds:

~separate the seeds from the pulp right away and soak the seeds in a bowl of salted water for a little bit (15 min.-an hour or so)

~pour the seeds/water through a strainer, pick out any additional pulp, then drizzle a little olive oil over the seeds and mix.

~spread the seeds out on a cookie sheet sprayed with Pam and sprinkle with salt (I like to use sea salt) and bake at 325 degrees for about 25 minutes (I tried using the convection oven this time and found 18 minutes was a good time for that).

~cool and eat!

Happy Halloween!

A Project or Two…

Yesterday, Wendy at Relatively Unique published a blogpost that made me really tired.  Wendy, besides working full time, is renovating their home a little at a time, currently changing an existing stable into a playroom, making homemade suet cakes for the wild birds who visit to dine on, repainting and reupholstering chairs, making craft/décor items to sell in her craft shop, sewing a Halloween costume, hanging curtains, helping her kids with their own craft project, and running for president.  (I made that last one up, but I think she if she can keep up with this schedule, she ought to be able to run the country).

After I read her post I took a nap.  And then I looked around me and realized that I too am a busy person with lots of projects!  Let me show you!

First of all, I have this pineapple to cut up.  It’s actually a very tricky project because I need to time it just right.  I don’t want the pineapple to be too ripe, but I also don’t want it to be not ripe enough.  You can imagine the sleep I am losing over this one.

Also, I have three very ripe bananas that are just begging to be made into banana muffins.  I am trying very hard to not make them into banana muffins because banana muffins are my favorite, and I am trying, as always, to cut down on the calorie consumption.  Walking by those bananas every day and not making them into banana muffins is sapping a lot of my strength.

Next up is the guinea pig.  He’s always been a bit shy.  A guinea pig’s first line of defense is hiding, and Herbie must have some good Guinea Pig Genes, because he’s pretty much always hiding under something.  I’ve been spending a lot of my free time with him, talking about how he is safe here, and loved, and how we have no hawks flying around our kitchen hoping to grab him and make him their lunch, and how we would love it if he would leave behind the boxes and tunnels and join us as an equal, as a loved and cherished family member.  I ask him lots of questions about his childhood and his parents and I encourage him to try to think of the moment that he feels damaged him so much that he must hide away from his loved ones.  We are still working on developing his trust.

I’ve also been working on my junk collection.

I like to keep my junk collection on my entryway table because I feel it gives guests that “Welcome Friend!” feeling.  I think my collection is coming along nicely.

I also like to keep my junk collection in my “baking corner” (note the mixer) to discourage any baking of banana muffins.

Another project of mine that has been very time consuming lately are my Dust Communication Displays. 

You would be surprised at how long it takes to accumulate an adequate amount of dust for these displays to work!

I’m sure you can see that waiting for the dust to collect, the junk to accumulate, the guinea pig to trust, the bananas to rot, and the pineapple to ripen are huge time investments and energy busters.   Whew!  Do you feel as tired now as I do?  Feel free to take a nap.  But please don’t visit me right now.  I am really much too busy working on my projects to entertain you at the moment.

73

We celebrated two birthdays over the weekend. 

                                            (The furry one, not the blond one.)

Also, this guy:

                                                   (The handsome one holding the football.)

Really, we all got together to celebrate Dave’s dad’s 73rd birthday.  At some point during the afternoon, someone asked how old Ozzie the pug was (he belongs to Uncle Mike and Nicole) and we found out he’s 10 1/2, which comes out to about 73 in dog years!   

Ozzie’s a nice dog and we love him.  But we love Dave’s dad even more.  I could blab on about what a great man he is, how thankful I am to him for raising his son to be an excellent husband and father, how smart, funny, kind, caring, earnest, trustworthy, deliberate, and steadfastly there for his family he is.  He says what he means, and he means what he says.  More than anything, you can count on him.  I love him like he was my own father, and I just count my blessings that when I married Dave I got to claim his dad and mom as (almost) my own as part of the deal. 

We had a great afternoon.  The autumn weather was perfect for some football and tree climbing and chatting in the backyard.





It was a good time to show off your muscles and look at old wedding photos!



And there were cupcakes galore!


Happy 73rd birthday to Al and Ozzie.

A man and a dog were never more loved by their family than they are. 

October Book Review

First of all, I’m sad to report that I won’t be reviewing this book for you:

Though the title and cover photo were intriguing, the pile of books next to my bed is piled too high.  Maybe I will get to it for you someday.  Ahem.  Or maybe not.

So to begin:

Confessions of a Prairie B*tch by Alison Arngrim-  Okay, I mostly loved this, but then, I am a sucker for celebrity autobiographies.  (In case you’re wondering, my favorites are Julie Andrews’ book,  Home:  A Memoir of My Early Years; Carol Burnett’s This Time Together: Laughter and Reflection; and Melissa Gilbert’s A Prairie Tale.)  Arngrim led an interesting life, the child of unorthodox parenting (little tidbit for you:  her mother was the voice of Casper the Friendly Ghost, Gumby, and Polly Purebred), she was the victim of years of physical and sexual abuse by her older brother, and of course, she is best known as the evil Nellie on Little House on the Prairie.  Arngrim gives us lots of LHOTP details, which was awesome, but even better, Arngrim can write pretty darn well!  Many (most?) of these celebrity memoirs sound like the celebrity’s voice, you can almost imagine them telling the story into a recording device and then having some peon type it all up for them.  I didn’t feel that way about this book.  I highly recommend it, especially if you are a LHOTP fan.

The First Husband by Laura Dave-  I was looking forward to reading this one, because it was recommended to me by Jen Lancaster herself!  Well. She didn’t recommend it to me personally, but she did overwhelmingly recommend it to her readers, so same thing almost.  I borrowed this one from my friend Maria who also really liked the book, so I felt kind of bad when I gave the book back to Maria and admitted I really didn’t like it.  It wasn’t that it was poorly written, because I think it was very well written.  I guess I found the plot both jaded and yet slightly unbelievable at the same time (newly dumped wife goes on journey to find herself…yet falls in love with cute restaurant owner after a single one night stand and they build a life together with slight wrinkles from first husband and her feelings of not quite knowing who she is yet).  Eh. 

The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta-  I mentioned to you in my last book review how much I was looking forward to this novel, as the premise really seemed to grab me:  the title refers to the people left behind after the rapture, or as the leftover people in the book call it, “The Sudden Departure”.  The reason they don’t refer to it as the rapture is that the leftovers are not who you think they should be.  Sure, there are some criminals and miscreants left behind, but there are also children, and pastors, and preschool teachers, etc.  They question if God really did take the good souls or if it was just some weird metaphysical thing that happened.  The ones who vanished into thin air also left behind a bunch of people who had to figure out how to live without them.  Was life still worth living if your husband and children vanish and you’re the only one left?  Do you return to college and make your way through life knowing just how tenuous your hold on life really is?  My only disappointment was that the novel started after The Sudden Departure.  Although the characters in the book discuss it at times (kind of in a “where were you on 9/11” sort of way), I was really hoping that would be part of the novel.  The ending makes up for it though.  It isn’t fireworks and sparkles, but it is a cool, thought provoking way to end.  I absolutely love a good ending and think it may be one of the hardest things to write.  Perrotta aces it here.

Bossypants by Tina Fey- so here I go again with a celebrity memoir.  I mostly liked Tina Fey’s book, though I think some of her jokes fall a bit flat without a studio audience to laugh at them.  Her early years were funny and interesting enough, but I really zipped through her Second City/SNL/30 Rock chapters.  Good, fairly quick read if you like Tina Fey.  Tara at Taradactyl also read Bossypants.  Click here to read her review and a bunch of other books she has reviewed (I am reading one of her recommendations right now --I Capture the Castle).

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley-  This mystery was given to me by my friend Shelley (hi Shelley!)  I didn’t realize when Shelley loaned it to me that it was a mystery.  I must admit that I can take or leave mysteries.  I went through a Mary Higgins Clark streak in my twenties and then read most of “The CatWho…” books (also in my twenties), but find I don’t have the patience for true mysteries as much anymore.  The heroine of this book, set in the 1950’s in the countryside of England, is eleven year old Flavia de Luce.  She is a smart, verbal child who hopes to solve the mystery of the almost dead man (he dies after saying his last words to her) she finds in her family’s cucumber patch before the police do.  Flavia was very likeable, and I enjoyed the interactions between she and her sisters (she does not like them), but I will admit that this one took me a long time to read as I kept falling asleep every other page. If you are a mystery fan, though, you will probably love it.  Thank you for thinking of me, Shelley!

 

Happy reading!