Lots of Lost Time

OK, so the sugar experiment lasted about a month.  I lost 5 lbs.  Woo.  I went back to adding sugar to things, but far less than before.  I cut out some of my bigger sugary habits, and I have been able to maintain the 5 lb. loss.  So, overall, not too bad.

Emma celebrated her 17th birthday, low key, as is her style.  She had a couple friends over and she had cake.


Later, we went out for sushi dinner as a family.






Sorry, no pictures of me.  I had the camera.

I volunteered to take on keeping the uniform locker tidy and repairing the uniforms for the school.  If it takes more than sewing hems or replacing buttons, it goes to Goodwill.  Skirts and sweaters with holes or beyond repair sometimes get delivered to crafters that turn them into doll clothes.

Kelly spent several weeks building a gorgeous deck!  After taking the deck boards off the old deck, he discovered that it was rotten all the way to the ground...it was a complete tear-out.  We decided to build it bigger (why not?) and have a finished deck that is twice the size of the original.



It is structurally sound...



Hosted a desperately unsuccessful Ithra event with a grand total of 13 students.  Several students were also instructors, and many classes had only one student.  Lesson learned:  pull the plug sooner and make clear parameters that if the coordinators send more than two of their members into the hospital, it's better to cancel the event than to spend that kind of time, energy and money on a failure.  Ugh!

I did, however, learn how to do Brocade Card Weaving.  This was an interesting technique to learn, but I chose a rather complex pattern.  I also had to double-up the brocade yarns, and you have to take extra care to prevent the threads twisting, so it slows the process down.



Camille's birthday was a low-key affair.  We celebrated with Chinese food...however, I didn't get any photos.  I also spent the weekend away, so she didn't have a party.  In fact, plans fell apart for several weekends following, so she's going to have to have a do-over at some point.

That weekend, I went to the quilt retreat!  I packed up a bunch of fabrics and spent two days cutting and sewing...
  


A week later, I was making beads!

  

  

Cammie and I went and "clowned" around in Fremont.  This is a statue of JP Patches, just outside the Geocaching Headquarters.  Of course, we were having a Munzee date, capping some of the hundreds of virtuals in the area.  Of course, we had to go visit the troll, too.

Cammie's Girl Scout troop is making pies to sell as a fundraiser.  They used pre-made crust, but they spent time cutting and seasoning all the fruit, filling the pies, and freezing them for delivery.

A couple weeks into October, we discovered that the wood around the garage was warped and cracking.  It turned out that it was all rotten.  So was the wood behind it and all down the right side.  After careful inspection, the handyman determined that it was poorly/improperly installed flashing around the garage, so the water was leaking behind the vinyl siding and the weather wrap.  He tore into it and said he'd be back to fix it.

On the 11th of November, the handyman finally came back to work on it.  He tore into it a bunch more and said he'd be back the next day...noooooope.  We'll see when he'll *actually* come back.

October 24th:  a hard day for the people in the Northwest when a student brought a gun to school and shot several friends and a couple cousins at Marysville-Pilchuck High School.  A sad and scary day.  We are several miles south of this area, so we weren't directly affected; they did not have a school lock down, but they did notify the parents of the incident.  The grade school wisely opted not to mention it to the students, but let parents talk to their kids about it in their own way.  Most of the high schoolers had gotten word via their cell phones, so they knew what had happened.  Emma was very calm about the whole situation, recognizing the assailant as a disturbed young man and said that she wasn't worried or fearful.  We had longer discussions about the situation and I deeply admire her maturity and wisdom.

That same day, we went to our school's Halloween carnival.  We had spent hours making costumes (and this is, of course, the Royal "we"), so we loaded up and went into town again and let the kids loose in the school, playing games and earning prizes.

    
Kids dressed as Zelda, Link, and L (from right to left)

The food table was pizza, burgers and home made sweets.  Some of the cupcakes were really clever!


A few days later, on Oct. 27th, I woke up with a backache.  It was over my left hip, but didn't seem too bad.  By 10 a.m., it was getting pretty painful.  By noon, I was in tears.  I went into the walk-in clinic (which has a blessedly short wait), and saw a doctor who suggested that it was probably the sacroiliac joint, though he didn't order any blood work or X-rays.  He prescribed some vicodin and said I need to take my anti-infammatories and alternate ice and heat.  After three days, I was out of vicodin, but I had made an appointment with a doctor--my GP wasn't available, but I could see someone else, and I said OK.  I get in and she tells me that she can write another prescription for vicodin, but I would need to see my regular doc if I needed more after 3 more days.  I said that I wanted to get an appointment with my doctor, and she said that my doc wouldn't be available until November 17th...nearly three weeks later.  Absurd.  I wrote a letter to the clinic telling them that this is unacceptable practice.  I haven't heard anything back, which is frustrating, so I may have to go in and talk to them personally.

I hoped this would be gone in a day or two, but it was the beginning of 9 long days of laying on the couch.  I couldn't drive, I had trouble sleeping, I couldn't even stand long enough to take a shower.  It was agony.  Now, 17 days later, the pain is almost completely gone, and the numbness in my left thigh is greatly reduced.  Will this return?  I hope not, but it's possible.

Laying flat on my back (or on my side) for so long, I had a limit on what I could do, creatively.  I couldn't sit up or stand, so sewing, cutting, or many other things were impossible.  I decided that if I sat up a bit, I could knit, so I pulled out a couple balls of wool that I received as a gift from the Baroness of Aquaterra and with Cammie's assistance, wound them up and cast on a scarf.  I pulled it out three times because I was unsatisfied with the pattern I chose, but it kept my mind occupied in between naps.  I may pull it apart again and do a completely different project.



I'd like to do something like this, but I don't have a pattern.



Ben worked on his engineering badge for scouts by assembling this hydraulics kit that Kelly picked up.  They had a great time working on it together, and then Ben had fun picking objects up with the tool.



On Monday night, I was happy that I was healthy and strong enough to go with Kelly and the rest of Gang Green to the second leg of the Sounders game against Dallas.  40,000 of our friends saw them have a 0-0 tie.  This combined with the 1-1 tie in Dallas gives Seattle the win.  WHY?  Because an away goal is weighted slightly heavier than a home goal.  If we also had a 1-1 tie at home, it would have been completely balanced and we would have had to go into overtime.  SO...we go to the next level of the Western Conference finals, and we have to play LA Galaxy twice.  After that, the winners of the Western and Eastern conferences play for the MLS cup.


This last couple of days have been a flurry of activity, and in my spare minutes, I was looking at photos of looms.  There are a few on Craigslist that are selling very cheap; I saw THIS one for $50, and if I had a pick up truck and a spare room, I would have driven down there to get it, even though I don't have enough weaving experience...I'm not ready for a big floor loom.  Someday.  I want to start weaving on a rigid heddle loom, like a Kromski Harp loom (I have my eye on a 32" loom).  I'm also working towards having a warp-weighted loom to attempt to weave on.  I have the loom pretty much ready to go, but I need to set it up and give it a shot, but not until after Thanksgiving.

The carpet is getting replaced before the holiday...I'm so excited!  The carpet is SO GROSS!  We will be replacing all the carpet eventually, and I'd like to do it myself, but I'd like to start in a small room that won't be seen...like my closet.  If I can get that to look OK, then I'll try in larger areas.  But for starters, and in the most public rooms, I'd rather have a professional do it, and the downstairs is going to be done in a couple weeks!

The next six weeks are going to be VERY busy.  I have a large quilt commission, a smaller quilt job, and a large quilt restoration...and all to be done before Christmas.  Now that I can finally stand again, I can get started.  I'm going to be running myself ragged...I only hope that I stay healthy.

Geocaching Adventures

As part of a Girl Scout badge, I took Cammie out to find Geocaches last Sunday.  I find it really interesting that they have this badge for geocaching--a technological treasure hunt--which may be gone in a few years' time, but they have omitted just about every fiber art in existence until the girls reach high school.  However, while we have the opportunity, and since this really isn't something that can be done in huge groups, Cammie and I went on a walking adventure together in the neighborhood and found two of the three caches we went looking for.  The third was hiding a little too well and although I have since gotten more hints, the weather has not been conducive to making another attempt.  We sought out one more today but it was hiding too well and we were unable to uncover it.  It could be that because it's fall and there are leaves covering the cache, or maybe that the kids were not patient enough to wait for it to be found, especially in the rain.  I think I may just go out and find more by myself.  Since then, I went to another site and found a cute little cache that I will have to take her to later to complete her badge.  We also need to make a trade item to leave in a cache box, learn how to read the GPS tool on my phone, and help a travel bug move around to a new location.

Today I was concerned because I wanted to get a walk in, but it was raining rather hard, and while walking is beneficial exercise, I hate walking in the rain.  More than anything, I hate having wet socks and wet feet.  I ordered some new waterproof shoes from Lands End, but I can't get my feet into the shoe.  It's not that the shoe is too narrow or too short, but the actual hole to get my foot into this slip-on moc is TOO SMALL to get my foot in.  I have no idea how they managed to make a wide-width shoe that you can't fit your foot into the shoe opening.  Someone in the engineering department needs to have his head examined.  So I need to take it back to Sears and see if they can replace it.  Heck, I may have to take it to the Sears closer to Seattle since the nearest one is abysmally small.

However, I lucked out on the exercise front today since it has become a tradition for me to walk with the trick or treaters, and by some miracle, the clouds parted and the weather cleared.  We started out with just my three kids, and within a hundred yards or so, we picked up two neighbor girls, Miss K and Miss T.  Miss K is 9 and Miss T is 7, so they're pretty close in age to my younger kids.  Their grandma walked with us as we made our rounds, and about an hour in, Miss T decided she was done, so she and her grandma walked back up the hill.  We went a few houses further and Emma decided her feet hurt from the shoes she was wearing and had a large enough haul to satisfy her.  Ben, at almost the same moment, decided he was done as well.  They walked back to the house together.  So now it was just me, Cammie and Miss K.  They finished the loop around the neighborhood, filling their bags to the brim (OK, not quite to the brim for Cammie since she took an actual pillowcase from our closet...not something I would have recommended, but she had already started out before I realized what she had taken; next time, she can take a re-usable grocery bag to avoid damaging our pillowcases by dropping it frequently on the wet ground).  It took about 90 minutes to make the rounds and we were all exhausted by the time we got back.  I calculated that it was roughly 1 1/2 miles up and down the hills, so probably a grand total of 1 mile per hour, but a workout nonetheless.

Tomorrow I have nothing planned, so I may try to find a place to walk to find some geocaches--maybe around the lake, where I believe there are five hidden--and if I can find them, I'll take Cammie back there and make shorter work of the search by pointing her in the right direction and seeing if she can find them herself.  We'll also need to make some tradeables to put in the bins, or just some treasures to share with others.  I'm thinking maybe some yarn zombies or leaving some of the rubber bracelets that say Cure CF.  We bought a bunch of those things years ago with the intention of handing them out back when the rubber bracelets were trendy.  We gave a few away but we still have dozens in both kid and adult sizes.  In any case, I'll need to find larger caches and avoid the micros for a while.  They get frustrating trying to find them since they're usually about the size of a tube of lip gloss.  Maybe we'll go find one of the big 5 gallon buckets in the woods.

Time to FLY

Went to a pumpkin patch with the Girl Scouts.  We went through two small corn mazes and then picked out pumpkins.  We ran a little long on time, so it was frustrating to have to race to get back into town in time for one girl's soccer practice (we were late), but getting this many kids organized and herded into cars was very difficult.  We had a talk with them about getting going faster for the next field trip.  

Ben loved posing in this cardboard cut out of a truck.  He made me take pictures of him from each pumpkin and window on this thing.  Each cut out had a different goofy face, but this was my favorite!  He's so sweet!

We got home from the pumpkin patch with three pumpkins--I offered one to Emma to carve and she said, "No, thanks."  Well, I couldn't just leave the pumpkin uncarved, but I needed to get dinner underway, so I suggested to Bekah that she carve it, and maybe she could carve Rex Velvet into it. She looked online and found a picture of his logo, and she set to work carving it.  It looks pretty cool!  She then cleaned three pumpkins worth of seeds, which I soaked and roasted the next day.  I'm thinking maybe next year I can plant some pumpkins--I love the idea of gardening and landscaping, but I don't really care for it.  Maybe I should have married a gardener...

I made a few cakes for the Halloween carnival.  These cupcakes were heavily frosted to make a cupcake cake.  I made one for the cake decorating contest, but somehow it ended up being donated to the cake walk instead.  Either they donated ALL the non-winning cakes, or someone put it on the wrong table.  In the end, it didn't really matter--apparently a few 7th grade boys won it on the cake walk and devoured it.  At least it was well appreciated!

This one was the Graveyard cake.  I wanted to make some cool-looking headstones, but had trouble finding cookies that were the right shape and size.  I got some cheap Mother something...you know those cookies that come in bags with the animal shapes but they're covered in that awful frosting and sprinkles?  Same brand, but they're chocolate fudge cookies.  Like Oreos, but rectangular and with fudge in the middle.  They're not bad.  I opened them up, scraped the fudge out and stuck them in the cake.  I wish I had had a fine-hole type of cake decorating tool so I could carefully write RIP and dates on the headstones, but I didn't...I just used frosting and a toothpick.  It didn't work that well, so I won't try that again.  Maybe I'll try a ziplock with a pin-hole poked in it.  

Pumpkin patch cake--chocolate & chocolate.  This frosting was originally vanilla cream cheese frosting, but I needed brown...I didn't have any brown food coloring--amazingly enough since everyone has some of that, right?  I thought about going to the store to get more, but figured I could just add some chocolate syrup to make this the flavor & color I needed.  I poured a bunch of syrup in there, and it was just vaguely tan.  Almost a grey-tan.  Gross looking, really.  Then I got out the Dutch cocoa and started dumping that in.  I got it all over the place and eventually, it got brown...and thick.  Added a few tablespoons of milk to loosen it up again.  What a pain.  It still tasted good.  Probably would have been easier to just go to the store.  Ah well.

I also made a set of cupcakes and decorated 12 of them with white frosting, M&Ms and chocolate jimmies, and the other 12 with white frosting and candy pumpkins.

At 6:00, we headed over to the school for the carnival.  Each classroom had games set up in them, which are easy enough for the little kids to play, and tickets are earned for winning games.  Those tickets can be redeemed for prizes in the prize room.  Ben had already picked out the prizes he wanted, so when he won enough tickets for those two things, he was done playing games and wanted to spend the rest of the time playing in the inflatable bouncy houses.  

Ben standing in line for the carnival games, practicing his winking.  He was frustrating when I was trying to get him ready to go--he didn't want to wear the coat that it took me more than an hour of shopping and five stores to find.  It's a little big, which was a problem I figured he'd grow into, but he wasn't convinced that it was the right fabric/cut/style/etc.  He was delighted that I found him a button-up shirt for his ensemble, and that several people recognized who he was.  

Although we dropped her off with her friend after school, Emma came to the carnival for a little while.  She wasn't wearing her big, fancy get-up, but elected to wear the more comfortable outfit that we assembled last year.  She said she didn't want to wear something so fussy and didn't want to wear the big wig and risk messing it up, so she packed the simpler costume.  Her friend decided to wear a pretty dress and the big blue wig.  They ran into their friend, Bryce, and hung out with him while they waited for Miss E's mom to finish volunteering in one of the classrooms.  Today they planned on going to the anime convention and will meet up with Emma's new friend, Miss S.  I haven't met this new friend, but I met her other friend, another Miss E, who has a prosthetic left arm.  Sometimes she wears her Hook hand, and sometimes she wears the "Creepy Mannequin Hand."  She seems like a very funny kid and they two girls have a great time together at school.

I made a costume from an old sweatshirt from a second hand store and some black fabric I had lying around.  I made a collar and created a Ringleader jacket.  I also bought a white button up shirt and a top hat, and I wore my black pants and made a ribbon bow tie from scrap fabric.  I think I spent about $10 on the entire outfit.  I didn't win the adult costume contest (again), but I got lots of compliments at the carnival.  That was great!  It turned out the prize for the contest was a whopping $5 gift card.  Woo.  

I am frustrated still with the level of cleanliness in the house.  It seems no matter how much cleaning I do, it gets trashed in a matter of hours and no amount of bribing, cajoling, punishing, manipulating, threatening, scheduling or pleasantly asking can get anyone to help me out around the house, so for a long time, I just gave up.  I clean for three or four hours, breaking my back getting it tidy, and I go to the store and return to the front room torn apart, books and coats dropped wherever they happen to land, and debris littered everywhere.  I have to create a better battle plan.  Not sure how well it'll work, but I'm going to try the FLY lady plan for a while.  The first couple of days, you just have to make sure the kitchen sink is clean.  I can do that.  However, on that first day, I went into Ben's room and boxed up over 200 books that he no longer needs (a dozen or so came from Cammie's room, too).  I posted a note on my FB page and found a home for them all with my friend, Elizabeth.  She has a toddler so she could take all the young kids books away and promised to find a home for anything she couldn't use.  EXCELLENT!  Three boxes of junk we don't need!

This week's "cleaning zone" is the master bedroom, so I did a little bit of tidying in there.  I emptied the recycle bin, pushed the drawer back under the cabinet (it broke off the track some time ago, so it just lays on the floor under the cabinet and we slide it out when we need something), and organized Kelly's dresser drawers a little.  There are a bunch of mysterious things in the bedroom that aren't mine, they're not being used but I don't know what to do with them, and they're too valuable to throw away.  One of them is some kind of pedal system for a flight simulator game.  I saw something similar on eBay that is listed for $150.  I don't like to list things on eBay, though.  Maybe we could put it on Craigslist. My next goal in there is to put away all the summer clothes in the closet and pull out all the warmer winter clothes.

I may not be perfectly successful with the FLY lady thing, but it's worth getting something started.  It suggested putting post it notes everywhere reminding me what I'm doing and positive affirmation stuff, but I don't like the idea of having post it notes everywhere, which to me looks like more clutter.  Modification is key, I think.  I'm also supposed to come up with a mantra or something I can say to myself while I clean, meditate, or while I'm sitting in the car.  She had just said, "I love you" to herself.  I've tried thinking of something that is a message of positive affirmation without sounding really corny, but I haven't come up with anything yet.

I'll take suggestions.

November!

Yes, I've been away.  I've been mass-busy.  (Is that a word?)  Totally.  Maybe it's "mas busy", like Spanglish?  Probably.

A week or so ago, I was considering hanging up the "closed" sign for my business because I wasn't getting any new calls, no new tops to work on, and no prospects on the horizon.  I'm a member of three guilds, I've offered gift certificates as prizes, I've talked to a lot of people, but to little avail.  Then, just when I swore I was done, I got six customers asking for work to be done.  Six.

One of them is a lovely lady by the name of Violet.  She gave me this top to work up for her daughter. She said I could pretty much do anything stipple-wise, and I asked if I could do something fun...she agreed.  I was able to do more of my favorite swirly Dr. Seuss feathers, which echoed the design on the fabrics. The colors for this are much prettier than in this picture.  There are purples, blues, olive green and yellow...it's really striking!  It's also enormous!  It was 108" square--that's 9 feet wide!  My frame is only 10 feet wide, but the machine's needle doesn't reach the last 4" on either side, so it was almost the maximum I could have on the frame.  The biggest I ever did was 114" wide, and I had to quilt most of it, then move it over and finish the last foot or so on the other side that I couldn't reach.

I also finally got one of the winners of the Christmas gift card to bring me a piece to work on.  This is just a simple stipple around the mooses, zig-zagging in the border, and some fun stitching in the stars.  I assume it might be a test-piece to see if I do good work before giving me something more valuable.  It would be nice to have another customer on the regular roster.

Michele gave me three tablerunners to work on, too.  The most urgent was this leafy tablerunner.  I had fun filling in the background with holly leaves and quilting stems and veins onto the red leaves. 

Two of them were identical--this is one of them, which she requested to have holly quilted on.  The second one needs a backing fabric added to it.  I went to buy a piece to put on the back, but I miscalculated how much I needed, so I need to go back and get something else.  It's an odd color of green, so I only found one piece of fabric that matched well enough.  Maybe I'll try to find yellow or red instead.

I also got a couple calls from people who are getting ready to bring me things--one is my sister's neighbor, another gave me some work a while back and she's got 7 antique quilt tops from her grandmother that she wants finished, and another gal who was given a personal reference from Sharon.  I've got a few things underway!

In addition, I made a pair of costumes for the girls to dress up as St. Margaret Ward, the woman who was tortured and killed for helping a priest escape prison by using a rope she smuggled in to him (hence the rope in the picture).  Those were posted in the previous post, so rather than duplicate efforts with the details, you can scroll down to see the pictures of the parts.  Here's Miss O in her costume on Nov. 1st.  Her dad was surprisingly impressed.  He's known me for a dozen years and he's still surprised.  And this isn't even my best effort--I didn't have time to add the lacing on the front of the doublet and it could have had all kinds of bling added, but I went simple.  It is, after all, just a costume.  She may be able to wear it next year, but if she doesn't, then we're not out a lot of money.  The fabrics were things I pulled out of my stash.  The floral was free from Omi's closet and I wasn't sure what I would do with it, but this was absolutely perfect!  The greenish skirt was some broadcloth that I had sitting around and there was plenty to make two matching skirts for the girls, and may still have enough left over to make a tunic or two.

I needed to get it to her before Halloween, so we met up last Sunday to hand it over.  We had lunch at a burger place about half-way between our houses (35 minutes north of me, and about the same south of her).  The girls were really happy to see each other, and Cammie immediately changed into her skirt, a gift from Sharon, that matches Miss O's. 

Earlier that day, Cammie had a soccer game and I snapped this picture with my phone.  It takes some good pictures sometimes...and she's very photogenic.  :)

I made costumes for myself and Kelly--I decided we should be dressed as Brett Maverick and Mrs. Annabelle Bransford.  I actually wanted to do this last year, but ran out of time, energy, momentum, etc.  I got patterns for the vest and dress  from the local fabric store, but had a lot of trouble finding *just* the right fabric for the vest.  I wanted to get something heavier than quilt-weight cotton; something more like upholstery weight, twill, denim, or something similar.  I didn't like the colors (or price) of the upholstery stuff, the twill was all plain (yawn), and other fabrics just didn't seem right.  After searching for more than half an hour, I finally wandered over to the quilt fabrics and found this Civil War reproduction, which worked just perfectly.  I was concerned about the weight of the fabric, but after I lined it with muslin, it worked just fine.  Not wanting to take all the time to make the vest and find it doesn't fit or won't button properly over the girth, I sewed the front up (didn't get around to putting the buttons on) and left it open on the side, so it ties under the arms.  Then I went out and got some additional pieces for Kelly--a simple shirt (didn't have time to make him a lucky shirt) and tweed pants from a second-hand store.  The pants were NEW with tags on them still.  The shirt was not new, but it still looked new.  Add a little ribbon from the ribbon box, and a creative shave, and presto!  He's back in the mid-19th century.  In all, I think I spent about $25 for his costume. 

Mine was made with a cranberry taffeta and some little trim.  I originally was going to make a saloon girl/burlesque costume, but I decided to go a little more conservative.  I can always shorten it and add more fringe and fancy dancy stuff later, but for the school party, I decided to go less racy.  The vest and skirt are separate, and I was sewing the costume until just minutes before we left for the carnival.  Had I given myself a few extra days, I would have made a bustle for the back and an underdress.  I did make bloomers and a petticoat, but had some trouble with lacing it up the back.  Mostly because I didn't have time to sew lots of hooks and eyes, didn't have a zipper, and really didn't want to add velcro...I'll have to make a few adjustments and maybe I can wear it again next year.

Ben chose to be Zorro.  I gave him a costume catalog that had come in the mail and said to look through it and decide what he wanted to be.  This was what he picked out.  I was able to find the costume online cheaper--minus the hat and sword.  Those I found at a costume shop a couple weeks ago for *really* cheap.  I think the sword was $1.50.

The kids also spent some time disemboweling gourds.  I helped cut the lids out, then allowed them to pull the guts out, placing all the seeds into one bowl and all the slime into the another.  I then washed and baked the seeds as part of Ben's pumpkin project for school.  Cammie chose to carve a cat in the moonlight from the pumpkin carving kit that we bought a few years ago.  The difficulty with these paper kits is that they suggest that you tape the pattern onto the pumpkin.  Tape doesn't stick to pumpkins...did you know?  Especially wet, slimy pumpkins.  We were able to get the pattern transferred on there and she used the mini saw to cut out the cat (rather than the moon).

Ben chose a more unique design--Jack from Nightmare before Christmas.  I had to free-hand it since there was no pattern for it in the kit.  It turned out rather well, I think.  We placed them on the porch and things went well until the day after Halloween, when we found Jack Splat in our driveway.  Really, he was more Humpty Dumpty--cracked in a few places, not scrambled pumpkin in the road.  A couple days later, the cat-in-moonlight pumpkin suffered a similar fate.  Both of these hallowed out gourds will end up in the compost bin by tomorrow. 

The Annual Sugar Beggary Festival went swimmingly, as usual.  Each kid collected around 6 pounds of candy.  Emma and a few teens toured the neighborhood together with their mom, while I went around with Cammie, Ben, Miss J. and her sister, Miss S. and their mom, my girl scout co-leader. 

It was a cool but dry night and we all had a great time.  I hear from several other friends that Halloween in their neighborhoods is a bust.  Sad to see such a fun tradition dying, but it is alive and well here!