Happy Halloween!

While the pumpkins from our yard never fully "oranged", they earned top honors for being easy to carve and smelling just darn good.

Roople regards the old bedroom window

Snapshots into our weekend...

Sunset Maples in full color - one is more orange, the other more red. We love them equally.




The 20 foot long pumpkin vine. I measured it, and bear in mind, that twenty feet does not take into account the fact that that vine is twisty-turvy.

Six pumpkins from our yard, two from the store (can you guess which are which?)




The "lil' baja" (aka, the chiminea) is a wonderful thing to have when you are working outside on a crisp fall day.



Fantabulous carrot cake with the best cream cheese frosting - Remi made it in honor of Andrew's 32nd birthday.




Mac and cheese from Smitten Kitchen - eating while I'm typing - tastes way too good for my own good.

Little Truck, Big Truck

America's Obesity Problem

Tis the Season

I've never understood the concept of Spring cleaning. When Spring comes around, I'm so jazzed to get out of the house and into the world again that the last thing I want to do is spend my weekend cleaning. Fall cleaning on the other hand, is a different story. In Fall, the weather starts to fall apart, the light starts to fade, and one is faced with the prospect of spending the next 8 months cooped up inside with all of this crap. This is the time that I get down to the business of cleaning. Anybody who visits Goodwill in the next month will likely be walking away with one of our pieces of discarded treasure. Enjoy!

$1.50 = good times

For some it's a shoe sale, for others a clearance markdown on leather purses. For me, it's the Annual Friends of the Library Used Book Sale (well, it's the other two as well, but for today, it's the book sale), where a $1.50 buys you a little bit of bliss.

It was my particular good fortune that the sale was held in St. Johns this year, just a mere mile from my house. To add to my joy, the sun was shining, the air was crisp, and Mike got up early and made coffee. I walked to the sale with a smile on my face the entire way.

I walked home with an armful of books - some never read, some old favorites for my library. In a perfect world I would have spent the rest of the day reading. In this world, I spent the day sanding, priming and handing tools to my husband.

A stack of unread books makes me really wish for that rainy day.

Sanity Saved by the Book

For the last week my sweet mac has been kaput - 4 months old and it had to undergo open-case surgery to fix a busted video card. It was an extremely frustrating week trying to figure out what was wrong, and why it was happening to my new computer. Luckily, once I got it into the Apple store it was fixed within days and free of charge. When sharing my frustration with my sister, Sara, she told me that at least it's a Mac - where if it's going to break, it'll most likely happen within the first year - which at least falls within that free one year warranty period. Always looking on the bright side, that sister of mine.


In the meantime, without my computer and with the rain pouring down, the "wall" has been covered with tarps until drier days, and I have been hiding out in the bathtub with all the Robert Crais books that the library has to offer.