PUMPKINS

It's that time of year again!!! PUMPKIN TIME!

This year we let Tom and Jeremiah join us.

I had a great time doing what ever I wanted:

Tom had a great time showing his love for NY:

And Brian made a creepy pumpkin which we will soon connect to our fog machine:

And Jeremiah very kindly cleaned all the pumpkin seeds:

Laying Sod

After we took out the buckthorn last year there remained a few open areas where we could do 'something'.

Being crazy I decided we should clean up the area and lay some sod. So we borrowed Brian's grandpa's tiller. Which is an amazing machine. It however whooped me. I've really only tilled areas that have PREVIOUSLY been tilled. So they've been pretty nice, easy tills. This however was full of roots, rocks and obstacles. So to put it frankly it was not fun.

Then to make matters even more interesting it started to rain. Determined to finish the entire project that day I still connect our trailer to our littler corolla (rolla) and headed off to get sod. I picked up 40 square feet of sod hauled it back - carried one by one down the hill and laid it out. After laying the first 40 I went back for another 20 - despite having an overwhelming feeling to do it another day. But I got the sod and got it all laid. Here are the before and after pictures:

Ceiling

Our ceiling re-do was finished December 12. We really could not wait to get out of our basement. We took of the popcorn texture and replaced it with a knock-down and then had it painted. This is kind of what the final texture look likes, hard to show with a picture:

Where did all our furniture go?

I awoke on Sunday morning to find our front room like this...


And our family room like this...

And then I walked into the porch and realized that my new feng shui decorating was not such a good idea....

Pet Viewing Area Upgrade

Around a year ago we had a bench custom build by Jeanne's dad to fit in the area next to our front window, the whole purpose of the bench was basically to allow the animals to look out the front window...secondary purpose was of course to add some additional setting to our front room.

So for about a year the bench has sat in our house with random blankets to soften the bench for the pets. BUT NO MORE will the animals need to worry about a soft spot to lay while they stare down those who walk by our house. Finally I bought some foam and sewed a cover for it.

Here is the final product...ignore the fact that it looks like everything is overly yellow....perhaps tomorrow I'll try to take a photo and post what it looks like with natural light.

Pumpkin Carving!

We have finally carved the 71 pounds of pumpkins.

Here is how they started:


Brian's pumpkin #1, carve time = 2 hours:


Kate's one and only pumpkin carve time ~30 minutes:

Brian's pumpkin #2, carve time < 10 minutes:

The complete family of carved pumpkins:

BUCKTHORN!!!

Most of the people we know who live in the twin cities area don't have many trees in their yard, heck most people we know in the cities can COUNT how many trees they have in their yard. Granted, we could probably count ours too - it would just take some time and some creativity around the property line.

So having trees is GREAT - love it, would not want to live some where without a lot of trees. However it became apparent to us that we had many buckthorn trees - a very invasive tree (read about buckthorn here). So we decided it was finally time to remove many of these invasive trees from our yard. Turns out that was around 70 trees. So in less than 24 hours we removed 70 trees, rented a wood chipper for 2 hours, wood chippered all 70 trees (in less than two hours!), and then put stump remove on the trees we were unable to pull out. Needless to say we are beat.

...But now we have little to no buckthorn, which really opens up the woods around our place and a huge pile of wood chips. I'm sad about the woods not having as much coverage - but the trees that were getting choked by the buckthorn should start to grown better and it also leaves room for us to plant trees we want!

TC's new sleeping spot

I came in from outside today to search for something on the internet - I'm sitting at the kitchen table and I begin to hear something coming from the kitchen -- I look around the kitchen and I see nothing. As I'm turning back to look at my computer out of the corner of my eye I see TC (The Count) rolling around - ON TOP OF THE PANTRY! We have been able to train Pixel to not go on the counter but I'm beginning to believe there is no hope in TC's future.


Then after I took a picture of TC I decided I needed to capture the other animals too...