Can you tell it's starting to look like Halloween here?
I walked into WalMart a few days ago and saw that they were selling their pie pumpkins already, so .....
I had to buy some!
I only bought three to start with.
to START with
Last year I didn't do anything with Halloween, so I am excited to do it again this year. I am going to do a Black Cat theme.
More on that later as it progresses. Right now I'm working on the menu, but it's still only in the beginning stages.
So last week we decided it was time to go visit Stephanie and Kristian again. She moved from North Pole to Fairbanks so we wanted to see her house. Plus we wanted give her a bed for her guest room. Now that we are down to only one guest room, we had an extra bed that we weren't using, so we wanted her to have it. Not only for her benefit, but for us as well, so we would have somewhere to sleep when we visit her.
Also, I wanted to unload some blueberries on her because we picked a LOT.
A couple weeks ago we made our third trip to the cabin to pick 5 more gallons. So we picked roughly 15 gallons total. That's a lot of blueberries.
When we got to Steph's house, it was good to see Shadow again.
Sitting on the piano (MY piano!) seems to be one of her favorite spots, but mostly she just stays curled up on a chair in the guest room. Sometimes she slept with us at night.
Koda, as usual, was excited to see us.
One of our priorities was to build a bed for the rhubarb that we brought with us. We needed to thin ours out, so we took the opportunity to give some to Steph cuz she didn't have any.
She has a big garden bed in her back yard which hadn't been used in a while, but it had good dirt in it, so some of that dirt was shoveled out into the rhubarb bed. When Chuck scraped the dirt out of the sides he said that the garden bed looks like it used to be a foundation for an old cabin or something, so that was interesting. We know that Steph's house is "old", so it's possible that there was an original cabin on that property before the house was built. It would be interesting to find out more about it if we could.
After we got the rhubarb established in its new home, Steph found something else for Chuck to do: fix her dishwasher. So Chuck crawled underneath her sink to fix that problem. The dishwasher wasn't working because it was clogged.
It stunk REALLY BAD - it smelled like a really BAD case of gingivitis.
OOFTAH!!
He also replaced the lights in her bedroom, and attempted to fix her lawnmower, but he was defeated in that one, which left him frustrated. So he kept pretty busy, but he likes it that way. Sitting around and relaxing is not relaxing to him, so Steph knows it's a good idea to save something for him to do if she needs anything fixed.
On Monday the weather was really nice so we decided to go for a walk - Chuck's idea because he ran out of things to fix. It turned out to be a 6-mile walk, which was long, but we all enjoyed the exercise.
On the way, we noticed that Koda was getting more excited. She knew that we were close to the dog park, so we stopped and let her get some doggie socialization.
Then we came to Pioneer Park. I have never been there before, so it was interesting to see some old cabins that they had there.
Then Tuesday came so it was time for us to make the drive back home. Being a cooler rainy day, we couldn't start on the road without a cuppa joe from the Mocha Moose.
They even gave us some free chocolate covered coffee beans!
Yum!
Not exactly the scenic route, is it?
It got prettier when we got closer to Denali.
So now that we're back home, things are back to normal, but there are some things we're trying to take care of before winter sets in. Chuck is still trying to finish the outside painting (on the front side of the house), and also we want to get our garden beds established.
So we had Barry come over with his tractor and hired him to scrape the grass off of the area where want to put our beds. Chuck wants to lay gravel there so he doesn't have to mow the grass around the beds. That would be a big pain in the butt.
So now we have a big square dirt patch in our back yard. Lumber is kind of hard to find these days, so Chuck called a lumber mill somewhere in our area and ordered enough rough cut wood to make eight 4'x8' beds, but now Chuck is saying that there's enough room there to have ten beds. So we will just start with eight for now and build two more next year if we want them.
And then, we also found a place that sells organic compost dirt. It's supposed to be BEST garden soil in our area, so we are going to have that delivered next week.
I am really excited to have a garden again!!!!
Well, that's about all for now.
