Annual Pumpkin Carving

Muck Removal

Hola!

Couldn't get through October without having our traditional Pumpkin Carving Family Home Evening.

(Again: thanks to Kara, we decorate for, and celebrate holidays to the max!  The fall school and sports schedules overwhelm me so much, I would - sadly - probably take a "pass" on some of this.  But energetic Kara will have none of that!)

We usually wait until pretty close to Halloween Day to carve the pumpkins.  Maybe we learned that in southern California, where it's always warm and your pumpkin gets old and moldy after just a few days.  But even here in the Arctic North, we have a few warm days in October, so we are still better off waiting.

Make sure all the gunk is cleaned out...

Eeewww...

searching for the perfect pumpkin face

Get the music playing on Pandora.com...

Sometimes we like intense music from adventure movie soundtracks.  No words, just fast orchestra music that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

(Think John Williams with Star Wars, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Also Hans Zimmer, with Pirates of the Caribbean, Mission Impossible, The Dark Knight Rises, and Inception. The music is phenomenal.  They belong to an amazing, elite club of genius composers.)

Puking Pumpkin

So anyway, David (our high school senior) found this great group who plays very intense music--their music could be part of soundtracks for very intense movies! We really like the music when he plays it for us on youtube, and we ask him the natural question, since we like it so much: "What group is this?"

"Two Steps from Hell."  (Oh.  Bummer.  Now I can't recommend it to anybody without swearing.  That's a little awkward.)

Teresa requested the Open-Mouth, Puking Pumpkin.  Sometimes it's a little ridiculous, what you can find on the Internet.

Got to get a picture of this on my phone

Here are the final products, with candles to show them off on the doorstep!

Thanks to all the Whitesell participants. :)

Fall Stuff

This is about the 10th time I have tried to post on the blog, and then I am distracted by "the next thing!"

It's a rainy, blah day today, but I'll put up the photo I took yesterday of a pretty tree by the middle school.  We do have SOME really nice, picture-perfect fall days in October.  Just not today.

LEAVES CHANGING.  In front of our house the trees are still mostly green.  But as you drive around town, you can see the yellows, reds, orange leaves.  Very pretty!

NEW MAILBOX.  Frank spent time Saturday digging out the old and putting in a new mailbox post.  I think it looks much better!

Now the mailbox has the same "look" as the lamp post.  (in the 2nd mailbox photo you can see the lamppost to the right an behind the mailbox.)  Here are some before and after photos.  Somebody kind of bumped our mailbox, so it was held together for a few weeks by duct tape.  (I dont' have photos of the duct tape, sorry...)

PET CEMETERY.  We said good-bye and had a mini-funeral for Spice, Kara's hamster, who passed away last week.  Hamsters only live about 2 years, and Spice was 2 months shy of 2 years old.  We have a little "Pet Cemetery" in the back corner of the backyard.  It now shelters 3 hamsters, and a garden snake from a few years ago we found in the basement and kept for a little while.

Our backyard looks very different now (the tree in the center died last year), but I've pointed to where we buried the animals, way back in the corner.

BAKING A SNAKE.  Here's Kara's science project...she made a milk snake out of clay, baked it, and painted it to show the adaptive coloring!  It looks like a coral snake, which is poisonous, but the milk snake is not poisonous.  But its enemies don't know that, so they stay away.

Ok, by the way, there was only one "K" in the set of letters!  Kara creatively used an "X" for the second "K" in the title: "The Milk Snake." :)

DECORATING for HALLOWEEN.  If it weren't for Kara, we'd have a boring house!  For every holiday, she digs around in the bins in the attic and finds things to hang up, to decorate the house.  Halloween is only 11 days away, you know.

Well that was probably more than you wanted!  But doing photos on the blog (or anywhere) is therapeutic for me, so that's mostly why I do it.

Hope your October is going well.  Have a great weekend!  Kari :)

Mary Lou's Memorial

Hello!

I completely forgot to mention Frank's Virginia weekend, in the last blog post.  (We did miss him over the weekend.  It was a pretty quick trip.)

Frank got to visit with some family members he hasn't seen for awhile, when he went to a memorial service for his Aunt Mary Lou.  She passed away during the summer and Amelia (his cousin, Mary Lou's daughter) organized this additional memorial service, for those who didn't come to the one earlier in the summer.

I remember Mary Lou's passion for nature.  She would take these crazy-long camping trips, and got into birding.  Then it became a quest to search for birds, birds, and more birds, in their different habitats, in different regions of our country and Canada.  I think it was called the "700 Club" that she was in.  She observed and identified over 700 species of birds! I posted this bird on our blog once, and she told me almost immediately what it was.  (I can't remember the name now.  But she knew!)

Her brother Bill remembered how she was a voracious and fast reader.  When they were younger, he would watch as she would read, just slowly turning pages continuously.  He was skeptical, and didn't think she was really reading.  Periodically he would "quiz" her on the material she had just gone through.  And yes, she would actually remember the information!

Once she came to our house when we lived in Colorado, and she showed us her very fancy, custom camping van.  Frank and I were amazed at all the amenities, that she squeezed into a normal-sized van!  (Who cares if it rains or not when you're camping, if you have one of those cool vans?)

Here is a photo of Mary Lou when she was in her 20's (my guess).  Isn't she beautiful? :)







And here is the group of family members who went to dinner after the service.  Frank was glad to be able to visit with his aunt & uncle, cousins and their families.  It's good to get together when everyone lives so far apart.

Thanks, Amelia, for organizing this!  You're a star! :)

Joys of October

Hola--

It's October!  Yes!  I love this month.  New England has a few really beautiful months, and this is one of them.  The leaves have started to change, so as the month progresses the drive around town becomes brighter and more colorful.  It's truly wonderful.

Two weeks have gone by since the last post.  I'm thinking it has been more like two months.  It is fall, and every fall I am (Understatement Alert) a little overwhelmed.  They are all good things, mind you!  I just feel scattered.

PHONES.  This was a more painful and tedious process than we could have imagined, but we have a new family plan with phones for everybody.  (As my brother Kris would say, "Nice, Kari.  Welcome to the 90's.")  It is true we have always dragged our feet a little on the newest technology.  Why pay for the hype?  Just wait a few months/years and the prices come down.  We all have phones, I said.  NOT smart-phones, or the newest and fanciest version of whatever just came out from Apple.  Plain phones, no Internet on the phones.

We are ALL texting now, finally.  Some of us more than others, to be sure.  I think Kara -- 7th grade -- racked up 1000 in one week.  Please.  (Of course, I think she has more friends than all of the rest of us combined...?)

The catalyst that pushed us to finally get everybody phones, has been my own thinking: next year David will be in college and (pause)...will we EVER actually get a phone call from him?  Maybe not.  But we may be more likely to get a text from him.

So here we are.  We switched to AT&T--again, it was a nightmare, so I can't recommend them to anyone--because they had the best-priced family plan for us, with the corporate discount from HP.  And after hours and days of waiting on hold (you think I'm exaggerating but I'm really not), and occasionally talking to people, who had varied and different information they would make up...

(Happy Ending) Over the course of 2 weeks of agony, we finally talked to two different truly helpful people.  One of those people was appalled at our runaround story.  He went into the computer and gave us credit for 2 months of service on our account.  Yes.  I was floored.  Awesome!

IN OTHER NEWS.  A new mailbox post sits in our living room, to be hopefully installed this weekend.  I might have before/after photos next week.

SOCCER.  Kara's school team is doing quite well, and Kara is improving and really likes the game.

VOLLEYBALL.  This sport is such a highlight for Teresa.  She wishes it would last all year.  It does make for some loooooooooooong days, though, leaving the house for seminary at 6:00a.m., school, vball, and on game days home at 8p.m.  Homework, she is not so fond of.

PUMPKIN LAUNCHER.  The Young Men at church are in charge of the youth activity this week.  David has been building, along with other youth and leaders, a pumpkin launcher.  They will get into groups to design and decorate a pumpkin, then they will launch them outside.  Prizes will be given for creativity, design, distance, etc., etc.

TUTORING.  I finally have a schedule pretty well in place for my tutoring at school.  (Bonus: they even sent my time cards, after about a month, so I can get paid!)  They are such nice kids.  I have a really good job.

FIVE THINGS to be THANKFUL FOR.  To finish the post, off the top of my head:
1)  I am thankful for reliable transportation.
2)  For sweatshirts in the fall.
3)  For other adults who care about my kids, too.
4)  For sunshine breaking through the clouds.
5)  Comfortable, nice-looking shoes.  On sale.

Happy Week!  Kari