HALLOWEEN STUFF/JUNK AND A SPIDER

Happy Halloween

That's about as creative as I'm getting this year. We (okay, it's 95% Phil) has been cleaning out the spare bedroom and that is scary enough! We have, I'm guessing, several thousand books and a whole lot of other "stuff," which my nephew, Cameron, says is "good stuff" if it's yours. If it is viewed by someone who doesn't have a emotional attachment to it, it's "junk."

So Happy Halloween, and I hope your scary day is not accompanied by a room full of scary stuff/junk, like mine is.

Here's my Pinterest Halloween board.

ROADKILL GRANDDAUGHTERS

Lisa was dragged behind a car. Well, not quite, she still needs a bit of work.
One more pass and she was wounded a bit more

Poor little things.

Kate's eye is a little messy. What's a grandmother to do?
The process. Taylor paints the tire with black paint.

Phil backs up.

Well, girls, is this all right?

Happy Halloween

I'M GLAD HALLOWEEN COMES BUT ONCE A YEAR

Where are the days when little girls wanted to be a princess and little boys wanted to be a ninja?

This little boy was once a clown. This little girl was once a princess and wore a pink prom dress. She wore that dress so often that she wore it out. She even wore it to wade in rain puddles with yellow rain boots. And look at them now.It's enough to give a person nightmares. I hope Phil doesn't mind me sleeping with the light on.

THE CAT EATING PUMPKIN

Oh, lookie, the Great Pumpkin is back. I'll just smell him to make sure he's the real thing.I better smell everything, while I'm at it.Hey, did anyone over there see when the great pumpkin came back?

He brought Ghostie with him. I don't much like Ghostie, he's a cheerful sot, way too cheerful and stands way too tall. He annoys me in a ghostly, cheerful, tall, sort of way.Kramer, are you down there? The Great Pumpkin came back along with annoying Ghostie but you are not invited to the party. Ha! That's how much you know. I am the party. I am a party animal. You are just a squinty, annoying cat. I will not even look at you until you apologize for wearing my handsome, manly devil costume. See me ignoring you? See? Well, all-rightie-then, if you're going to be that way, see if I care. I'll just see what is in the pumpkin.

Oof! It's kind of a tight fit, but I can do it because I'm pretty. Not squinty! Pretty. And pretty darn flexible, too.

And then I turn around a few times and then some more. Aah! This is the perfect spot Until she starts to snore. It echoes. An echoing-snoring-cat-in-a-pumpkin is not any one's idea of great Halloween fun.

A snoring, Halloween-pumpkin-cat is enough to give Kramer the evil eye.

It's all fun and games around here.

BEWARE OF THE RED DEVIL

"My human put me in this disgusting costume and, if you don't mind, I don't want you looking at me." "Did you hear me? I said DON'T LOOK AT ME."

"Wait. Is that the doorbell. I have ta go now and defend the house from evil doorbell ringers. Barkbarkbarkbarkbarkbarkbarkbark."

"It was a false alarm. The doorbell was on some stupid TV show. And look at that fool, Pika who got tricked into wearing the costume. Hahahahahaha. I look manly. I look brave. She looks silly. She looks squinty. She needs to give that costume back."

"Wait! Is that the doorbell. Barkbarkbarkbarkbarkbarkbarkbarkbark."

THE LAST OF THE KALE SOUP and THE MUTANT CHILD and UN-MUTANT CHILDREN

Why is it that I can't just ignore the last of the kale in the garden and not feel like I have to use it up? I also had tomatoes ripening so that was a double whammy and so made the LAST OF THE KALE AND BEAN SOUP, so help me, it has to be. I am about souped out. I froze some and saved some for dinner and packaged some to share.

The following hilarious photos were on Kraut's blog today, he called this sweet young thing the Mutant child. Now I ask you, does he look like a mutant to you? Me neither. He can't help it if he has locks of fluorescence.Kraut thanked the Soap Queen for their wonderful children. Darn right. Does she look old enough to have seven? I don't think so either.

On the other end of the valley we see Curly Sue as the Greek Goddess. With that curly hair she looks the part.
Tuesday is a grinnin' Minnie.
Gilmore Girl showed all the candy they got on her blog and you know what? They did not get one stinkin' wrinkly apple or pencil. What's this world coming to, I ask you? Those kids won't have anything to complain about when they are old and decrepit like me.

Note: If you live in Arizona and then you can just say, "pfttt" tomorrow when the rest of us are grumbling about sundown being SO DARN EARLY. I would forgo the extra hour of sleep to keep things the way they are. How about you?

SIX WORDS FOR TRICK OR TREAT, SMELL MY FEET

Feet, dressed up like a skeleton.

TRICK OR TREAT, SMELL MY FEET, GIVE ME SOMETHING GOOD TO EAT

Trick or treat, Smell my feet,*

Phew!

"No, smell MY feet!"

Someone forgot to tell Roger Federer that he should have left his SKELETON feet at home and put on his real feet. Oh my.
"Roger, get those scary feet out of here or at least put on some shoes. Is this who I've been playing against? Skeletor? I'm gonna hurl. Projectile hurl. It's gonna be ugly. but not as dang ugly as those feet."

Give me something good to eat.

So, Trick or Treators don't want pickled beets and pickled onions but that's what I made this afternoon which morphed into the evening which meant Phil answered the door forty-'leven times.

He was so cute with all the kids and even the big kids. He never once said, "Aren't you a little old to be Trick or Treating?" to the junior high kids and even the high school and--ahem--college kids. He commented on their costumes and always wished them a Happy Halloween. He's such a nice guy, my Phil.

Hope your Halloween was great.

Don't tell anyone but I miss my little kids. They were so excited that they changed their minds about what they were going "to be" about ten time before Halloween actually got here. When they got home after the great treating-hunting-gathering-fest they spilled all the candy on the floor and sorted it by types and kinds. And they always complained that one family gave pencils. Honestly, they had so much candy that they couldn't even eat it all and they complained about one stinkin' pencil.

But, perhaps they aren't so different from their mom who remembers one family in Annabella who always said, "What? It's Halloween? Lloyd!"--names changed to protect the cheap--"Lloyd, did you know it's Halloween? See if you can find something for these here kids." Which meant we were going to get a wrinkly apple. Now, I tell you, every year we'd get a wrinkly apple. I guess each time some kid knocked on the door she'd yell, "Lloyd, did you know it's Halloween?" because we weren't the first ones there.

If they were still alive I'd take them a pencil.

* Those are not my feet. I "stole" that photo off someone else's blog. I found worse photos, disgusting photos of feet but I was nice to the world and didn't post them. I didn't want more projectile hurling. Honest, they were a-word-worse-than-ugly, whatever that would be. Bad. You should thank me for not posting them. Seriously. Thank me.

THE MAGIC BROOM AND OTHER HALLOWEEN CHATTER

This is a magic broom. It was brought from our neighbor's house to poke into the tree to, hopefully, retrieve the football the broom owner's son and his two friends threw up there. One poke and the tree burped two footballs. I took the broom over to the owners house after waiting to see if it would fly there by itself and while there I took a picture of their Jack-O-Lanterns. Phil and I looked at the ice cream lid and saw a ghost and, at the bottom, a goblin. Not as impressive as a weeping Madonna statue, is it? But still. A ghost and a goblin.

I wonder if I could sell it on ebay for a thousand dollars. Too late, it's in the garbage.

And then, to round out our exciting evening we watched to see who had the heaviest pumpkin in Cooperstown, New York. The winner, One thousand two hundred some odd pounds.

I tell you, our life is just one round of excitement after another around here. Try to keep up.

SIX WORDS FOR HALLOWEEN CATS

Snoozing, plotting Halloween tricks for midnight.

CATS FOR HALLOWEEN

Halloween must be almost here.

There's a cat asleep in the pumpkin patch.

And this one is dressed up as "Road Kill."

ExCUSe me? You are interrupting my beauty sleep.

Howrude!

DRYING TOMATOES and MAKING PEAR JAM.

It's that time of year. Harvest time. This is a picture of the tomato plants in the garden.

The tomatoes are ripening and so it is time for me to start slicing the Roma's and put them in the dehydrator. This means I watch mindless TV in the kitchen. Today it was the Today show and Rachael Rey. When Phil had to go to BYU I tagged along and spent an hour in the bookstore.

There is nothing like a bookstore to restore your creativity. New ideas for books sprouted and festered and then I fled before they boiled over and made a mess that I wouldn't be able to explain.

The regular tomatoes are also FINALLY ripe and so I fixed a plate of tomato and basil sandwich fixin's, right on the breadboard where I cut the Roma's. Then back to the tomato-cutting grindstone. I watched MASH, and The Barefoot Contessa where I learned how to make truffles. It looked so easy. And delicious. Doesn't that look delicious? Here's the link in case you want to put it on your Christmas To-Do list. Oops, did I mention Christmas? Forgive me. It's only September, after all. I'm not mentioning Halloween yet, so that was really a slip.

You'd think I had kids at home. They always talked about holidays months and months ahead of time. I heard about what Halloween costume they were thinking about wearing right after Easter. That is enough to drive a mother crazy.There are mothers, all over the nation with glazed looks in their eyes from hearing, for the 78th time what their kids are going to wear for Halloween. Even mothers in countries that don't celebrate Halloween can understand.

Okay, back to the subject, sort of. After I filled the dehydrator I didn't have my quota of mindless TV today and so I watched some more TV while I made pear jam. A neighbor had given me a sack of pears and we have eaten pears until we are pear'd out. I couldn't throw them away--I should have sliced them and put them in the denydrator but it was full.

Phil reminded me later that we don't like pear jam. It's true. We don't. Actually we don't eat hardly any jam at all but I have jam-genes and it's hard not to answer the call of the fruit at Harvest time. It's a hypnotic call, you'd recognize it if you grew up in my house with my mother. It's sort of a haunting, do-not-waste-anything sort of a call.So, here is my pear jam, which we don't like. There was a bit left over. See the lovely chunks of pears in there. I also added some lime juice. I don't know why. It was the jam-gene, mutating.They all sealed--all the jars of jam we don't like. How lucky for us.

While I jammed I watched a movie so bad that even I was appalled. It was Final Days of Planet Earth. Daryl Hannah was the star. That should have been a clue. Finally it was coming to a close when...the sequel started. The SEQUEL! So, I made soup because I had to find out if Planet Earth really was having it's final days. I'll save you the pain. Planet Earth still has more days left.

I couldn't find the pinto beans in the basement and so the Kale and Bean Soup was made with kidney beans which, I'm sorry to say, was a mistake. If you try this soup DO NOT use kidney beans. You will loose faith in me as a cook, a pear-jam-maker with mutated genes, and a movie reviewer. But, I had made a double batch and so I froze four containers of the soup with the evil kidney beans. I'm sure I will be grateful by Halloween, when I don't have time to cook because I have to dash to the store for more candy for the greedy little goblins and ghouls, who have known what they were going to wear since Easter.