Boris and Bobby do the Monster Mash

Happy Halloween to one and all.  Hoping for lots of trick or treaters so I don't have to eat all the candy bars to keep them from going bad--you know, waste not want not.

Ready for Halloween

The carving is done, the Jack O'Lanterns are ready ; wonder if we'll get any trick or treaters, we usually average about 2 a year.

October

Lantana Tree

Lantana Bushes

After cleaning toilets, so much fun, I rewarded myself with time in the garden destroying weeds, so satisfying.   Not many flowers left, some lantana that the butterflies love, pots of pansies I potted yesterday and some impatients that just keep getting bigger.
Meanwhile Mac's been playing with Halloween stuff.  He made a web out of a shrimp net and spiders out of pine cones and  pipe cleaners.

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Pots of Pansies that don't care how cold it gets,
just not too hot

Impatiens With Pig

Halloween

Play Me A Song

Oh play me a song, " Take me out, take me out, where I can run, where I can shout, where the squirrels all fear me, where I can climb a tree or maybe 3, take me OUT!!!

And what was I doing that was more important than taking Miss Kitty out?  Why I was pulling fuzzballs off my couch.

Extra Long Shoe Laces

Let's be right up front about this, I HATE THEM!  They're a pain in the patooy.  I know why the laces are too long, it's cost effective for  the shoe manufacturer to only have to stock one length of shoe laces, long ones fit (HA) all lace up shoes. But knowing that does me very little good.
What to do with your long laces?  You can tie extra long bows, you can double knot them, use the extra holes at the top of your shoes, cut them down, wrap them around your ankles or spend the day tripping over them.  Right now I'm double knotting them, but I'm not happy, knotting them once is bad enough, double knotting them requires more manuel dexterity than I have.
For my next pair of shoes I think I'm going to get ones with velcro closure, then I'll officially be older than dirt and have to move to Florida.

Meslisandre

Oh Melisandre you of the flaming torch, I so enjoyed our visit today.  You filleted my right arm and sent part of it off to be examined, then
 burned numerous items off my shoulder and back.  I'm sure I'll be sleeping on my tummy tonight.  But if all goes well and she's expecting it to, then I don't have to go back for 6 months.  Thank goodness for small favors.

Memory, My Poor Memory

Box of Checks

I wasted an hour this morning looking for a box of checks.  I don't write a lot of checks, pay most of my bills online, but some places are still not set up for that so I pull out the old checkbook.  Today when I wrote my check I noticed that it was the last check in the book so I went looking for a new book to put in it.
Our bank has gone through a couple of mergers in the last couple of years and so through a couple of name changes.  They told us we could continue to use our old checks, but my checks were so old I'd  ordered new ones with the new name on them and when they came I put them away, somewhere.  Unfortunately I forgot where that somewhere was, I tore apart my desk and the area all around it looking for the boxes of new checks.  They were nowhere to be found.  I became worried, as I'm apt to do, and began to wonder if the checks I'd ordered had even come in or if something had happened to them.  Then I opened up Mac's checkbook and saw that he had one of the new checkbooks, so they'd come in or at least the ones for his account had, though I couldn't find the box of them either.

My oh so neat shelf

Then I looked on the top shelf of my desk and though it was obvious that there were no boxes there I looked anyway and lo and behold I found my checks.  Not in a box as I assumed they would be, but in a portfolio.  I felt stupid for not remembering that.
 I got a new checkbook out and put the rest back, here's hoping I remember where they are when next I go looking for them, but given the state of my memory which has never been good I'm really not hopeful.  But perhaps blogging about it will help.

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday to my sweet husband, my best friend and the one I've been lucky enough to spend my life with.  You'll always be the beautiful boy I first saw across the quad way back in high school.  Hope you enjoy your presents!

More Baseboards

More baseboards, lots more.  And bless Mac who did all the taping and clean up.  Now I just have to do our bathroom.

Busy Monday morning or perhaps it only feels busy because I'm so clumsy today I'm having to do everything twice.  Laundry done and on the line, bread in the bread machine and almost done, baseboards painted in Miss Kitty's bathroom, acres of honeysuckle cut back in the garden and here I am.
Mac said I need to change my header to something more Holloweeny, so I did.  And just look at the cute little dachshund he just finished.
I need to hide the Halloween candy I bought to give out better because according to the laws of physics, no 2 objects can occupy the same space, so accordingly  chocolate and I should not be near each other or we will soon occupy the same spot, namely me.
Using a variation on this "law" my Father once wrote an excused absence note for me saying," Because an object can not occupy 2 separate locations my daughter was not at school yesterday because she was home."
The school secretary gave me the strangest look, can't imagine why!

Boxes

Recently Amazon posted a bunch of Tweets that people had posted about Amazon Prime.  I tweeted that Amazon Prime was invented so my cat would always have a box to lay on.  What did cats lay on before boxes?
Then I saw this great picture on Pinterest, this could well be my cat!

Random Friday Thoughts

•  Both the Wild Card teams are going to the World Series, that's fun, but of course we'll be rooting for San Francisco 'cause we're originally from the San Francisco Bay Area----Go Giants!

•  Trying to send money in a foreign currency to a foreign country is a complicated job thanks to 9/11, you'd think we were trying to fund something weird instead of paying for a cottage

•  Our cat's on indoor restriction, she's becoming way too comfortable with hanging out with squirrels

•  We've finally gotten around to watching The Big Bang Theory from the beginning and it's great and  no, I'm not identifying with Sheldon, even I'm not that weird

•  For some reason the song "The End of the World As We Know It, and I Feel Fine" by REM is  stuck in my head  and no I'm not thinking about ebola

•  I have a Christmas project started upstairs, but it's sitting next to a puzzle and the puzzle keeps sucking me in, saying, "Come on, just one more piece"

•  Tomorrow our area is having a garage sale, we're not participating and I'm hoping shoppers don't show up at dawn hoping to buy some junk, I mean gem to haul home with them

•  I need to go find some pipe cleaners 'cause Mac needs to put spiders on our spider web

Have a great week end.

Scary Thought

Really had trouble getting to sleep last night.  Hate that, not just because I want to sleep, but because I always worry that I'm keeping Mac awake.  When I can't sleep I get the "rolly pollies" and I can't lay still.
Last night Mac asked me if I was channeling Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory and was thinking about sneaking out to clean something.  Channeling Sheldon would truly be a scary thought.

A Just Reward

Beautiful day today after the thunderstorms of last night, blue sky with fluffy "Simpson" clouds.  It was an errand day, so the horses were hitched up and we headed into town.  First stop was the bank where we worked out how to send £ sterling to the UK, very complicated since 9/11 'cause the government wants to know exactly who's getting the money.
Then popcorn shopping, I'm afraid we're addicts and go through a ton of the stuff, but fairly low calorie and no butter.
Then to Ace, you know, the place with the helpful hardware folks.  It's the nearest thing we have to an old fashioned general store, ours even sells Avon.  I needed white paint to do baseboards, I fear I have cleaned the paint off of many of ours and now I need to start painting them, again.
When we finished at Ace I suggested to Mac that we needed a reward so off to Plum's we went to have a banana split. Oh we were good because they were offering 2 splits for the price of one, but we just had one, with 2 spoons of course.  Banana splits are kind of special to us, we use to go out to have one WAY back when we were dating.  We went to an old fashioned looking ice cream parlor called Lois's that unfortunately no longer exists.  So having a split makes us feel like teenagers again, plus or minus a few wrinkles and grey hairs.
Then it was off to the grocery store to pick up a few things and 2 ENORMOUS pumpkins.
A really nice day.

The Long and the Short of It

Do you like long books, short books, short stories, series, novellas, what?  My own preference is for long books.  I'm currently reading The Last Lion by William Manchester, his biography of Winston Churchill and it runs 992 pages.  Even better it's the first of of a trilogy.  I love to read series.  If I like a book I hate it to end.  Of course I hate waiting for the next in a series to come out---do you hear me George R. R. Martin, don't do a Robert Jordan and die on me before you finish The Game of Thrones.
Some short books are fun Ella, Minnow, Pea (Mark Dunn) at  pages 208 pages  and The Uncommon Reader (Alan Bennett) at 120 pages and I will read them after reading a long book, but they're never my first choice.  I'll probably read Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villain Tales (edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling) at 208 pages before tackling the next in the Churchill biography.
And then I need to get going again on the long series I'm reading by S.M. Stirling, the Change series has 11 books in it so far and I'm on number 7, The High King of Montival.  Not great literature, but fun.
So what's your preference?

“but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.” 

 Jane Austen

Isabel

We received a post card recently  from one of our favorite people, Mac's cousin, or technically his 2nd cousin Isabel.  She's been traveling again, this time taking a transcontinental train across Canada, by herself.  Did I mention that she is in her 80's?  She's always been a traveler, when her Mother, Mac's Great Aunt (and she was still traveling in her 90's) was alive they travelled everywhere: across Russia on a train, the length of Africa on a train, cruises to the Middle East and Japan.  On her own she's been to China, Cambodia,Vietnam, Antarctica (more than once), all over Europe, Australia.
Any time I mention some place I'd love to visit, Petra in Jordan for example, she'll say, "Go, you'll love it, I've visited it several times."

Isabel on the left

Last year she told us about going to the airport in San Francisco to catch a flight to Vietnam where she was to join a tour, but her flight was canceled, but the airline folks told her to stay and they'd try and find her another flight.  They did, it involved flying to Beijing, changing to a plane going to Shanghai and then on to Hanoi in Vietnam.  She said she sat there for a minute, asked the Lord (she's very religious) if he thought it was a good idea and He told her to go for it, so she did and had a wonderful time.
She is elegant, lovely and a joy to be around. Her handwriting is so gorgeous, I'm jealous and embarrassed when I send her a card because my writing is so messy.
 I hope to be half as nice and as well traveled

 when I get to be her age.

Look at that handwriting!

A Nice Surprise

Went out shopping today and had a nice surprise, gasoline has dropped to $2.98 a gallon.  That's less than a pound of hamburger meat.  In the 3+ years I've had my car I've only put a bit over 8,000 miles on it, which works out to about 2700 miles a year, so I don't use a lot of gas, but it's nice to see it getting so low---lol---I didn't think I'd ever have thought that $2.98 was cheap for gas.  When I was a teenager and first became aware of gas prices  it was about 19¢ a gallon and coincidentally hamburger was about the same price and now it's $3.82 a pound.

Autumn in the South

The corner by the front door.

No the leaves aren't changing colors or falling and the weather isn't cold, but you can feel a change.  The angle of light is different, acorns are everywhere, making the squirrels downright giddy, and the humidity is definitely lower.  Yes we had a day that reached 90º this week, but with lower humidity it didn't feel bad.
Mac bought me two huge Chrysanthemums to go on the  front porch and we've set out our jack o'lanterns.  Will be picking up some pumpkins for Mac to carve tomorrow.  So even though the yard isn't looking very autumnal, the porch and stairs are.

Enjoying The Weather

It looks like summer is slowly, but surely, slipping away.  Yes the day time temperatures are still going up in the 80's, but it's been cooling off at night (no overnight temperatures in the upper 70's), we've actually had a couple of nights in the 40's :), and the humidity has been reasonable.
I worked in the garden yesterday and have finally deweeded (is there such a word? word check doesn't think so, but I'm using it anyway) one flower bed and started on another one.
I've also been trying to clear out the summer things from the house and bring in the Autumn ones, love the colors-brown, yellow, orange and black.
Miss Kitty, who lay around all summer like a melted blob of butter, now insists on going out in the yard everyday.  We caught her up a tree yesterday with a squirrel squawking at her.  Today she is restricted to the deck.
Mac, when not working in the yard,  has been busy painting, as always,

 and has finished a lovely little painting that is loosely based on a painting we saw in a Midsomer Murders episode (The Black Book I think).  I love it, trying to decide where it should go.

It's Here!!!!!

The delivery team for our new refrigerator called Tuesday night and let us know they would be here between 2:00 pm and 6:00 pm Wednesday, so we let our friend Mike know that if he wanted our old refrigerator, he was going to use it for spare parts, that he needed to come and get it.  So bright and early Wednesday morning he came to move it.  The entrances to our kitchen are small so he ended up having to take the doors off the fridge to get it out.  But out it went, down the stairs and up into his truck.  He asked it the new fridge was going to fit the opening we had and Mac said he thought fridges were all a standard size.  Mike said their width is standard, but not the heights.  So I ran to the computer, looked our new one up and sure enough, it was taller than our old one.  Luckily there was a decorative strip of wood on the bottom of the cupboard that's above the refrigerator opening so we were able to remove it and make more room.

When the delivery team showed up that afternoon we told them they'd probably have to take the doors off of the fridge to get it in the kitchen.  They measured the openings, measured the fridge and removed the doors.  Before you knew it, the fridge was in, with very little room to spare, the waterline was hooked up, all the drawers and shelves were put in and they went over the operation of the fridge with me.

Cubic footwise it's not any bigger than my old fridge, but the layout inside is so much better.

Here's hoping it lasts a long, long time.

Waiting patiently

It's gorgeous!

Love the double door opening on top

Like the freezer on the bottom with pullout baskets