October 20, 2016

I have nothing important or exciting to say.  I just wanted to "check in".  I'm going to be pretty busy now through next week, so I thought I'd better sit down and chat while I can.

Here is a picture of a pretty sunrise we had a few days ago:

Last Sunday morning I took a picture of the moon on our way to church:

The picture doesn't do it justice.  It was pretty awesome to see in person.  It's kinda blurry cuz I was sitting in a moving car.

I don't normally take my camera with me to church, but I did last Sunday cuz I wanted to show you my "sink" that I am now working with when I make the potluck drinks.

Someone brought in some hoses and attached them for me.  It's WAY better than hauling water all the way from the Janitor's Closet, so I am NOT going to complain.  However, let it be known that the big professional sink in the back of the kitchen was hooked up this week.  So that is nice for the ladies that will be using that one.  Also, I suppose it helps me too cuz now I won't have to take all the potluck server spoons home to wash them.

I didn't mind doing it, but it's one less thing I will have to do on Sunday afternoons, now that we can wash them at the church building.

Since I had my camera with me, I took a couple pictures of our potluck crowd:

We got more tables in there so now it's no problem finding a place to sit. I'm not sure if those picnic tables are a "temporary solution" until we buy more tables, or if they are permanent.

Speaking of food, here is something that I tried last week:

"Aren't I cute?"

They are meatballs shaped like rats.  I saw this idea a long time ago and always wanted to try it.  It was kinda fun to eat them, even if they did remind me of our poor hamster. And it was kinda weird shoving a green pepper stick up his butt, but I liked the effect of it after it was baked. The ears were supposed to be zucchini slices, but I didn't have any, so I used mushrooms instead. He was also supposed to have chow mein noodle whiskers, but I didn't have any of those either. I will have to try this idea on one of my Halloween menus sometime in the future.

Outside of Halloween, today I made these blueberry hand pies.  The recipe suggested using store-bought pie crust to make the job go really fast, but I do NOT EVER buy store-bought pie crust!  Instead, I used a recipe I had for "pumpkin empanadas" and used that for a crust instead.  It turned out to be a lot of work and very time consuming, so I can see why buying a store-bought pie crust was recommended.   But they turned out really good (I already ate 3 of them!).  Next time I might try to make them using home-made pie crust and compare. But now that I made them "ala" empanadas, I might not like them as much with pie crust, but ya never know!  I sure do like having a freezer full of blueberries to play with! 

My Halloween preparations are moving along, but I'm sort of at a slight lull right now.  I can't do TOO much decorating because that room is where Chuck does all of his "church books", so I can't cover up the computer or his file cabinet until as late as possible, like the day of the dinner or the day before.  So for now, I did what I could, and I will have to do a lot of last-minute decorating in the middle of next week.  

This weekend I will be going through my menu so I can make a detailed grocery list of everything that I will be needing.  It looks like our Halloween dinner will be on Friday, so if I have all my ducks in a row, everything should work out fine.

Other than that, there's not much to tell.  It's getting colder outside now, and we started turning on our gas fireplace.  At first Beanie was afraid of it, but now she knows it's a cozy source of heat. We put this bed down for her, and when she sees that the fireplace is on, she crawls in there and takes a bath, so we call it her bathtub.