Happy Halloween!

I think my most/least favorite Halloween memory was 1997. 

Our oldest son fell off of the jungle gym at preschool and suffered a compound fracture.  I received a call from the school staff as the ambulance was pulling away from the school. It was 4 days before Halloween.(Oct. 28)

It's funny the things you remember. I had a pot of ramen noodles boiling on the stove. I turned the burner off, grabbed the baby out of the crib, pulled my toddler out of his bed and took off for the hospital. (This was before cell phones.) I left a note pinned to the door for my husband along with a request for him to call his parents to see if they could meet us at the hospital. I had bought a huge pumpkin that morning, and had plans to carve it that afternoon with the kids. The pumpkin was still sitting in the back seat of the car.

Husband got home about 10 minutes after I left the house, and his parents were able to meet me in the waiting room at the hospital and take the kids home with them. (And my car. It had the car seats.) We found out that the kid was going to need surgery to reset the arm.

It was a very long night. He went back for surgery around 10 pm, and came out around midnight. He asked his father to spend the night with him, and I went home. Remember the ramen noodles? They were still on the stove, sitting in water.  They were next level awful looking. They went into the trash.

When he came home the following day, he had 2 pins in his arm around his elbow and a cast that took over most of his left arm, with a sling built into the cast.

Halloween day, I decided that we needed to keep things as normal as possible. So, I pulled the pumpkin out of the back of my car. The pumpkin that had been sitting there for 4 days. In the heat. In the back of my Honda Civic. While the toddler used it as a step stool to get into his car seat. The bottom was rotting.

So, I put the pumpkin on the grass, turned it over and scooped out the guts.  It turns out that if you do things this way - with rotting pumpkin - it is actually very easy to scoop things out. We decided to leave the entrails, if you will all over the ground and cut a very weird lopsided face into the side of the pumpkin and then put multiple tealights around the mess.  As the pumpkin continued to rot and fall apart in the heat of the tea lights, it made an especially gory mess.

The kid with the broken arm dressed up as a starving artist that year.  I had a beret (no comments about that - we weren't THAT far out of the 80's).  He wore sweat pants and a huge t-shirt that we were able to get the cast through.  We attached a piece of cardboard cut out and decorated to look like an artists' palette.  Voila!  1 starving artist costume!

I hope each and every one of you has a safe Halloween!

The Marathon - Home Improvement Addition

 If you’ve been around my blog for any length of time, you know that we bought our house from my in-laws. And they never moved their stuff out. We moved in, our stuff intermingled, and the long nightmare began. It’s been 17 years of cleaning and sorting. I’ve done cleaning challenges. I’ve gotten rid of 23 Things a Week for a couple of years. I’ve participated in the 40 bags in 40 days challenges. And still - there was always more stuff to clean and sort.

When we decided we needed to renovate the house. OK. With the black mold issues we kind of HAD to renovate the bathrooms. And because of the black mold - absolutely everything had to be out of the house.

We moved ourselves out of the house in July. We took what we had to live with us. We had to put the stuff we wanted to keep in storage. And then? There was everything else. For the next three months we slowly sifted through the everything else. 

The paper.  OMG. The paper. All told, we’ve taken over 100 boxes to shredding events around Central Maryland. That doesn’t count the boxes we’ve taken to the Paper Recycling Boxes around town.

We donated to the Habitat ReStore.

We recycled - a lot.

At the end, we hired a junk hauler who came and took the rest away.

Our house is finally empty.  FINALLY.

I suspect that we have many paper loving insects in our house that are slowly starving to death.

Seriously. 17 years. It’s been 17 years that we’ve been in that house and 17 years that I’ve been cleaning it out. And now? It’s finished. I feel like I’ve completed the worlds strangest and slowest marathon.

Teen Top Ten List

 I just published this list from the Young Adult Library Services Association on my YA Book Blog  here: https://librarynut-booksforteens.blogspot.com/2022/10/teen-top-ten-list.html.

If you're interested in a list of books nominated and voted on by teens for 2022, I encourage you to click on the link and head over to my other blog.  I'm trying to stay out of trouble, so I'm not going to copy and paste the entire post here, lest I get flagged by The Google for plagiarism.  ;) 

Enjoy!

Make Your Own Fascinator!

 I originally published this post on 5/21/2018. I had made my very own Fascinator to wear to work on the day of the Royal Wedding. While Fascinators aren't exactly high fashion in the United States, they are a LOT of fun to make and wear!  And with Halloween quickly coming, I thought someone might like to make something like this to wear as part of their Halloween costume!

I made a Fascinator on Thursday to wear to work on Saturday in celebration of the Preakness - oh, and the Royal Wedding.  It was actually very easy to make!

I used the pages of an old book that was falling apart to make a large paper flower.  Since I used a Dr. Seuss book, I used bright purple berries to make the centers of the flowers.  I hot glued the flower petals together.

I bought a spool of tulle and a found a spool of sparkly rhinestones in the endless crap supply in my basement, and a headband from the grocery store.  I scrounged some floral wire up at work, and the next thing you know, I had a fascinator.

I looped the tulle into 8 very big figure 8's, and then tied it in the center with the floral wire.  I did the same thing with the blingy tape, and wired it onto the tulle with the same floral wire that I wrapped around the tulle bow. 

I then hot glued the paper flower into the middle of the bow.  I wrapped the wire from the flower around the headband and Voila!  It's a fascinator! 

Oh, the feathers!  I forgot them!  We had a stash of feathers at work that someone brought in for craft projects.  I brought 3 of them home to use for my project. 

Note: Don't you love how I didn't bother to link any directions on how to make that flower in the middle? I know I cut petals from the book. I know they were rounded on one end and a square triangle on the other.  Honestly, what was I thinking when I wrote these directions?  I didn't have a Cricut at the time, but I seem to remember cutting out the petals that looked something like this: https://sweetredpoppy.com/how-to-make-large-paper-flowers/ and then took some poetic license with the shape of the flowers and the size of the petals to make a flower that would look decent on my head.  Seriously, why didn't I post the link or the pattern?  What was I thinking?  

Squirrels

So here’s a serious question. 

Squirrels. Here in the Mid-Atlantic are usually light brown or gray. 

This little guy above is what I think of as a typical Mid-Atlantic squirrel. I took this picture in Sunday morning. 

But we recently moved out, and we are living close to a major river and environmental area.

But do you know what I’ve been seeing running around here lately? 

Black squirrels. The last time I saw black squirrels was when we were in Niagara Falls. 

And now, they’re running around Central Maryland? 

Is this a thing anyone else has noticed?

The picture below is one of the squirrels from around Niagara Falls. 

 

Random Pictures

 A dump of my photos from September! Enjoy!

Hermie

Look who I found on my morning walk!

View from the spillway. 

So much fungi!

It feels like a Cathedral. 

Random Legos found in the library floor. 

I checked out a ukulele! Bonus, I’ve been working on playing it!

Dallas, Texas

 Last month we attended the funeral of my mother's youngest brother in Dallas, Texas. He served in the United States Army during the conflict in Vietnam. After his service, he went on to live a long and very fruitful life. He had 4 children, and he has many grandchildren. 

The funeral was on a Friday, and my sister and I spent an extra day in Dallas, exploring this beautiful city!

Here’s a few pictures from our visit:

The sculpture garden at the Nasher Sculpture Center. 

I kept seeing these Red Pegasi around town. Anyone know the story behind them?

We found the most amazing taco restaurant in this tiny little store front. 

The train station at the airport. When I got there, a plane was driving over the bridge. So cool!

The controls for my room. I swear it was smarter than me!

At the entrance to the National Cemetery. 

Light rail downtown. 

Oh, I’m done. So done!