Autumn Has Arrived

It seems funny to just be acknowledging that autumn has arrived when I've already stood in the middle of snow flurries weeks ago during our trip to the Adirondacks! But now we're back in Virginia and it's only now that the trees are hitting their peak color. Fall really is my favorite time of year. (Although with a pool entering our lives, perhaps that will change?)

I've been extremely busy lately, hence the lack of posts. But now that things are finally calming down, I wanted to take a moment to share my experiences and photos from the last few weeks. So let's pop open the memory card on the camera and see...what the heck did I do this month?

Oh, right! I took a cooking class! Two cooking classes!

After a bread baking class in the morning, I took a pasta making class in the evening!

It was a long day but really enjoyable.

The next day, I spent the whole afternoon processing pumpkins from our garden. I cut each pumpkin in half, scooped out the seeds and stringy stuff, placed foil over the cut side and then placed them on baking sheets, cut side up. After about an hour in the oven, they were soft and I simply scooped the pulp out of each one. That went into our food processor and then voila! Fresh pumpkin puree. Okay, a bit more work than just opening a can - and I can't compare the taste because I've never used canned pumpkin puree before - but honestly, it wasn't hard. If I hadn't been baking pumpkin cream sandwich cookies (and pumpkin bread...and toasted pumpkin seeds) at the same time, there would've been a lot of down time!

Yum, yum. Thank you, Real Simple!

(Click here for recipe.)

Wow, that feels like ages ago...But incredibly, hardly any progress has been made on the pool construction since then! (I'm going to wait until the pool is fully constructed to comment on that one.) When the plastic sheeting was taken off the pool, we got to see what was underneath!

The stairs are closest to the house and in the bottom right corner of the photo is the loveseat in the deep end (7 feet)! So exciting!

Last week we did discuss with the pool company that we are going to wait until the spring to have the finish sprayed on the pool because the warranty won't start until then. Not like we'd be going in it at this time of year anyway - no rush! (But just because we're in no rush doesn't mean we don't want to know what the hell is taking so long, pool company! Poor communication. All I'm sayin'.)

Eric is completely done with the fence, aside from the one section he has to leave open for pool construction equipment to get through! I don't have a great photo of that handy though, so I'll post one later. Hopefully it won't take me another three weeks to get to it!