Halloween 2020

Happy Halloween!

As I type this, I am waiting for my first trick-or treater.  It's 5:30.  Where are they?

Actually, I would be surprised if we got more than three.  Three is my magic number because I know we have 3 kids in our neighborhood.  About half an hour ago, my neighbors drove past me while I was walking to the mailbox - there went two of our neighbor kids.  So now I'll be surprised if we get more than ONE.

I put Mr. Bones out on the deck to greet that one kid, if he ever shows up.

We have a long porch that leads into the gazebo, and I was thinking how fun it would be to decorate the gazebo and create a scary "hallway" that the kids would have to walk through to get their candy from the gazebo.  It would be a lot of work, but it would be worth it if we had enough kids come.

On the inside of the house, I no longer have a whole room to work with for my "restaurant", so this time it only took a couple hours to get my decorating done.  Mr. Bones showed up before I was even done decorating, so I gave him an empty cuppa joe cuz I knew he would be sitting there waiting a really long time.  I don't even know why he comes here every year.  I know he doesn't come for the fellowship cuz he never says anything, and he doesn't come for the food cuz he doesn't eat anything.  I guess he just comes for the attention.  Some people are like that.

It's kind of a bummer that I have to do this in my dining area, which is not separated from the kitchen.  It seems to really change the effect; it's just not the same as it used to be when I did this in our other house.  Maybe next year I will think of a better way.  One of my guests would not even stay in his seat.  Even after my repeated pleas to "please stay seated and wait to be served", he kept standing around in the kitchen.  This is why I need a separate room for this occasion.

I also did a little bit of decorating in the living room.  This is our first Halloween in this house, and all of my Halloween furniture coverings no longer match what I am trying to cover, so it's almost like starting over with all the wrong pieces, and this is also the first year I haven't bought anything new because this year I just wanted to get a feel for what Halloween would be like in this house, and then maybe I'll have some ideas as to what I might need next year.

Peeka found a cozy spot snuggling up to the scary baby.

My Halloween dinner went pretty well overall.  We had 4 guests:  PW and her boyfriend Ryan, and Rocky and Bonnie, our friends from church.  The food turned out "meh" but I think everyone had a good time.

Rocky and Bonnie got here late so we started without them.

I was pleasantly surprised at how well this litterbox cake turned out.  It really did look like a litterbox, and the "turds" behaved just like turds when I was cutting the cake (they stuck to the knife and I had to shake them off).

So overall, it wasn't the same as past Halloweens, just because I didn't get to decorate a whole room, but creating the menu and having the dinner was still a lot of fun.

I'm thinking about maybe doing a rat theme next year, but I'm not sure yet.

Six 'o clock now and still no trick or treaters.  But Chuck's friend showed up to sell us our snowmachines that we sold to him before we moved, so it's nice to have those back.  And now that we got snow, we're gonna need those to get to the cabin.  

What am I gonna do with that big bowl of candy???

A couple weeks ago we had our Tea Party for the girls at church (ages 18 and under).  All the little girls were so excited to dress up all fancy.  It turned out really nice; they made everything real elegant for them.  I was asked to help in the kitchen preparing some of the food.  It was a lot of fun to be working in the church kitchen again - just like old times. 

And here is Pumpkin's 5-week photo, taken LAST week.  In a couple days we will get her 6-week photo.  Only a couple more weeks and we can finally see her in person (or doggie)!  And that will be nice because the puppy cam doesn't work half the time and I'm tired of being disappointed that way.

So that's all I have for now.

Don't let the bugar-man get you tonight!

Fall 2020

 Hullo, all!

Happy Fall, Y'all!

It is so nice to have the season of Fall!  As much as I love summers in Alaska, I still think Fall is my favorite season.  Not only for the bright colors and the magnificent scent of dead leaves 

(deep inhale.....................exhale.....aaahhhhhhh!)

But also because there is a lot of fun stuff going on in the fall every year (can you say "happy birthday" and "happy Halloween"?)

This year in particular has been a busy Fall.  Because of our move, we had to start over with our garden.  I mean, we had to start over from SCRATCH.  We had to build our garden beds and order some dirt.  But it was all good because this way, we could put the beds where we want them AND we could get some GOOD DIRT.

This time we splurged on the good stuff.

This is the best organic compost garden dirt you can buy in our area.  It was expensive, so I hope it was worth it.  This was only the first load; the next morning they came back with the rest of it, so we had a pretty big pile.  We were just kind of annoyed though that the guy didn't go back further on the plastic.  For some reason he said "this is back far enough", but it wasn't.  I don't know what he was thinking.  The next morning before he came back with the 2nd load, we had to lay down more tarp, which was annoying because the back half of this plastic was still bare.  Anyhoo, that is my only complaint about that.

So now that we got the dirt, we need to get some wood.  In case you haven't noticed, the home improvements stores are lacking in lumber these days, so we had to spend the extra money to have some wood cut for us from a local mom & pop lumber joint in Palmer.  We ordered enough rough cut wood to build eight beds and then had to wait 3 weeks for it.

When it finally came in, we got to work.

We started with two and then it was getting late so we built the other six the next day.

The weather was perfect for this job.

And then we had to wait for decent weather to start filling them with dirt.

One evening we managed to get one filled, plus one of my compost compartments before it started raining.  The rest had to wait until the next day.

You probably can't tell in this picture, but two of the beds have a compost compartment in them so I have somewhere to throw my kitchen scraps.  One of them is filled up because I've been saving my kitchen scraps all summer and I needed to finally empty that bin, so I was glad to finally bury it in the garden bed (mixed with dirt and mulched leaves and dirt).  

It was a lot of work (it took two days) to get all the beds filled up with dirt, and then we put a layer of mulched leaves and grass on top.  I hope that was the right thing to do - we are just going to leave it alone now until next spring.

No, that is not our camper - we are just storing it for some friends for the winter.

You can see that we still have some room left to build two more beds, which we are planning to do next summer, and also another bed for raspberry bushes, and maybe also a strawberry bed.

I am really looking forward to gardening next year!

In the meantime, other things are going on here.  Can you tell it's starting to look like Halloween here?

You all should've gotten my "restaurant" invitation by now, so you know that I'm doing a Black Cat theme.  I haven't done any decorating yet, but I did manage to work on my salt and pepper shakers.

I can't believe I only have two weeks left to get ready!

Other Fall happenings include a new granddaughter on the way!

(the 4-legged kind)

Meet "Pumpkin"!

She is a poodle, and will be ready to be picked up in November.

Isn't she adorable?  Stephanie is the proud mother of this baby and I am the proud gramma. I have been watching her every day on the breeder's web camera.  She is walking around now and starting to play with her siblings.  They are so CUTE.

I can't wait to see her and hold her!

That's about it, except for one more thing.  I saw this in my yard yesterday.

I was beginning to wonder if the moose ever came to our neighborhood cuz this is the first one I've seen since we moved here.

Now I know.

And I hope they don't ever find my garden!

Okay, so that's all for now!

Happy Fall, Y'all!

Fairbanks Trip

 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.