Tuesday, October 27, 2009

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!

Monday, October 5, 2009

A Case of Mistaken Identity

Eric and I have been tipped off in several ways (I'll spare you the gross details) that we have an unwelcome visitor in our house. It (whatever "it" is - mouse? rat? squirrel?) was there before we went on our vacation but I had hoped that after a week of no possibility for finding food scraps anywhere around the house, perhaps it would just go away.

No such luck.

So I wake up at 1:30 a.m. this morning and get up to go to the bathroom. I notice that the kitchen light is on, so I walk over to turn it off. And then I see it.

"Eric!" I yell. No answer.

Louder this time. "ERIC!"

"What? What is it? Are you okay?!" he yells as he bounds out of bed and out into the hallway.

"I think I see the creature!" I say, frozen in place.

"What is it?" he asks as he walks toward me.

"I can't tell - I don't have my glasses on."

He shows up next to me and declares, "That's TATER'S BUNNY."

For a second I am confused. Our rodent is actually a bunny?

Wait.

That's a stuffed animal sitting on the dog bed in the kitchen.


     . . .HA.

Unfortunately after that incident I couldn't get back to sleep until 4:30 a.m, creeped out that a real large furry animal was very likely scurring around our house somewhere. *shudder* 

I think we're going to have to call an exterminator before I am forced to check into a mental hospital.