Next year, I'm coating our jack o'lantern with cayenne

This past Saturday, we went to a local farm market to pick out this year's pumpkin.

We came home and Kiddo and Hubby promptly got to work carving said pumpkin into this year's chosen design.  As we've long since established around this here blog, Heather does not do pumpkin guts.  This was the first year that Kiddo did the majority of the carving work herself (under Hubby's supervision, while I popped in and out every so often for a quick picture but otherwise kept well out of arm and nose's reach of the goings-on).

Kiddo was well pleased with her kitty jack o'lantern when we set it out on the front porch and lit it up for a test run Saturday night.

Yesterday afternoon, Kiddo and I attended a Fall Fun event for our local Girl Scout troops.  As we pulled into the driveway upon our return, I noticed something a bit off with her pumpkin......

Closer inspection revealed that some critter or critters had zombie-fied Kiddo's jack o'lantern by snacking on it quite thoroughly (they also removed and chewed on the tea light I'd left inside it overnight).  I didn't catch any such critter redhanded (or orange-mouthed), but my strongest suspicion points in the direction of our multitude of neighborhood squirrels.

Kiddo was upset, naturally, and immediately clamoring for a return trip to the farm market to get a second pumpkin.  This request was denied as we were now less than 6 hours away from Halloween (and last night was a school night to boot), the market was closed and, frankly, we weren't overly eager to drop some more green on another delectable squirrel treat.  By this morning, the other parts of Halloween (costumes! parade! party! Trick or Treating with friends!) had mitigated her disappointment at the jack o'lantern mutilation somewhat, and off she went to school.  I went out to clean up the pumpkin detritus around midmorning, and decided that there was, in fact, enough unspoiled pumpkin on the back half that technically someone could carve a second kitty face onto the other side.

I promptly looked around.  Turns out the only someone who was home and available for such a project around 11 on a Monday was me.  (Well, I mean, I could've asked the cat, but she lacks both the attention span and the opposable thumbs for such an undertaking, and then there's the extensive list of things she's managed to damage with her own sharp bits over the years - do I really want to be arming her with a pumpkin carver?)

Have I mentioned how much I detest pumpkin guts?  I am not kidding when I say I have a pathological aversion to them.  The smell and/or feel of the inside of a pumpkin can induce the urge to vomit in me more than actually being vomited upon by another human being.  Seriously.  (Pumpkin seeds, on the other hand - delish! So long as someone else has cleaned them off and toasted them up.  Also, I love pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumpkin muffins - as long as I don't have to touch or smell the raw ingredient in its most primal form.)

I feel that it is a pretty remarkable testament to my overwhelming love for my child that I sucked it up and did this:

 and a pretty remarkable testament to my willpower that I neither threw up nor fainted at any point while doing it.  (I kinda wanted to do both at a few points along the way.)  (And as to Hubby's reply text when I sent him the above picture, yes, they had scooped out most of the pumpkin guts before the first carving.  Most of them.  The pumpkin was a far cry from pristine inside, and being out on the porch in the cold made it extra-clammy.  Unless some of the clamminess came from squirrel spit, but really, does that make it better?)

That isn't to say that next year, I won't be sprinkling our jack o'lantern quite liberally with cayenne pepper before I set it on the porch.  I may love the kid enough to suffer the trauma of raw pumpkin meeting my hands and nose once, but I have no intentions of there being a sequel.  I'd rather have to deal with actual zombies on my front porch then try to repair a zombie-fied jack o'lantern again, thankyouverymuch.

(Oh, and I am tired and punchy enough right now to point out that when lit with the slightly-gnawed tea light tonight, in the pitch black darkness that is 7pm in our parts this time of year, the kitty cat was glowing mightily in its newly carved facial area, but also casting light out of the rather gaping hole in its backside.  I believe there's an expression about blowing sunshine and one's posterior regions........)


Happy Halloween from me and mine to you and yours!  (Kiddo, for the record, was one of several Hermione Grangers tromping the grounds of school in today's Halloween parade.  She was the only one with a Crookshanks with her, however.)

Haiku: Almost perfect Saturday morning

All slept in til eight.

First fire of the fall roaring.

Just need some bacon.

Mostly Wordless Wednesday... the official portraits

I finally got my act together and got Kiddo's professional portrait taken, as I've done every year around her birthday.  "Around her birthday" used to mean within 3 days, max, back when she was younger.  This year, "around her birthday" turned out to mean within 6 weeks, give or take a day.  At any rate, it's done now, plus I had a coupon and I'll be able to save myself some mailing charges as we're heading to the motherland (aka Jersey) the week after next, so I can distribute the latest pictures in person to all the aunts, uncles and grandparents then.

Without further ado, Kiddo, age 7, the official portraits:

Mostly Wordless Wednesday...Lucky Number Seven

May 2003:

May 2010:

Happy birthday, lovebug!

Friday, September 25, 1992

Seventeen years ago today, I went on my last, first date.

We went to dinner and then to see this movie, which was opening that week.






This is us back when we'd been dating about six months. (Can't find any earlier pictures of us already scanned in and ready, and not awake enough to try to figure out how to use our brand-spankin' new scanner...)



...and us on our most recent vacation, one month ago. Times have changed in the past seventeen years, but I'm still really, really glad I went on that last, first date!

Mostly Wordless Wednesday: Sunshine and Sunflowers

There is a field up the road a bit from our house that was planted chock full of sunflowers. We've been waiting for the field to be in full bloom for weeks now, ever since the plants were first recognizable when they were but tiny, green stems mere inches above the ground. We pass by this field a few times a week, as it is on our way to many things, like Wegmans and the post office and Target... For weeks, nothing but taller and taller stalks of green greeted us as we went on our way to run errands. Then, finally, there was one, lone, yellow flower poking up amidst the green. Then five, then a dozen, and when we drove by last Friday, there were maybe fifty flowers in bloom.

Yesterday, we came over the rise on the road past the field and were greeted with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of flowers in bloom. Of course, I was prepared. I pulled over to the side of the road, changed Kiddo out of her shorts-n-shirt into an appropriately floral sundress and grabbed my camera out of my purse. A few moments later, we'd trespassed far enough into the field for me to take these pictures of my sunshine with the sunflowers...

Now she is six

When I was One,

I had just begun.





When I was Two,

I was nearly new.





When I was Three

I was hardly me.





When I was Four,

I was not much more.





When I was Five, I was just alive.





But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,

So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.


~ A. A. Milne



Mommy holding Kiddo at the hospital the night before she went home, June 2003



Mommy and Kiddo at the Lilac Festival parade, May 2009

Happy sixth birthday, Kiddo! You are and will always be my bug of love!!!

(For the story of Kiddo's birth, you can click here...)

Phriday Photo Phun - Love is in the Air

So, we're moving. (And there was much rejoicing.) Thursday, to be specific. This means that today was the last spring Friday morning Hubby and I will be awakened by the sounds of, to put it delicately, extremely amorous waterfowl on the pond behind our property.

Now, over the past nine and a half years we have very much enjoyed the view out of the back of our house. It contains a small pond with a copse on the other side, so we have seen many different forms of wildlife throughout the years. Deer, rabbits, foxes, groundhogs, beavers, snakes, frogs, toads and all manner of birds from geese, ducks and gulls to more exotic looking herons. You name it and chances are if it is a native species or a migrating species that passes through western NY, it's been out back at some point. It's downright bucolic.

Except, that is, when it is spring and love is in the air. Love, that gets downright loud, especially in the wee, small hours of the early morning. Love that can easily awaken one from an already fitful sleep (due to, of course, the utter Freaking Out Levels of stress about the upcoming move). It is moments such as these when I can look forward to our upcoming new backyard view, that includes the back of someone else's property and nary a pond or woods full of breeding wildlife to be found.

In case you think I'm kidding, I submit the following photograph of one of the trees in our yard, snapped on my walk back up to the house (the last time I'll take Kiddo to the bus stop on a Friday morning in this neighborhood!) about 20 minutes ago................

Birds do it, bees do it, and apparently even sometimes snails do it...

Let's hope the new neighbors aren't exhibitionists... though that would certainly make for some good Phriday Photo Phun pics though, now wouldn't it? The kind that are more of the sort that certain Google searches seem to be seeking when they drop by my corner of the blogosphere, rather than a pair of smooching snails. Bow-chicka-wow-wow!!

Wanna check out more Photo Phun, or play along? Pop by Candid Carrie's weekly Phriday Photo Phiesta!

Also, please drop by my dear bloggy friend Em's Comments For Cans post sometime today, leave her some commenty love and force her to drive over to donate the cans of food she's promised to buy with the tail end of her SUV positively dragging on the pavement behind her!!

Fourteen years ago today...

... I married my best friend.

Yes, I chose a burgundy velvet dress for my four bridesmaids. I still swear to this day that the dress could be worn again. You could *totally* wear it to a holiday party. My own dress was "candlelight ivory" as true white made me appear quite corpselike - not exactly the look one strives for on one's wedding day...


We opted to have birdseed thrown instead of rice as we left the church, because of the birds and their exploding stomachs and all. My family helpfully made up approximately one zillion little bags of birdseed, which were then most enthusiastically thrown at us - many people had multiple bags for ammo - as you can see in the above picture. I wound up using my bouquet as a shield as we made a dash for the limo. If you look carefully, you'll notice my father hurling birdseed from the church's doorway to ensure that we were bombarded from all directions. When I changed out of my dress, there was birdseed in my underthings and embedded in my skin as well, and still more came out in the shower the next morning from where it had become one with my bridal coif. (I felt a wee bit Sally Field-in-Steel Magnolias-ish with the amount of products the hair stylist used to create my bridal 'do - my hair was hard enough that one could knock upon it. I think that was more stuff in my hair on that one day than the entire rest of my life combined, which is saying something when you consider I'm from Jersey and I grew up in the 80s...) My siblings learned from our experience, and opted to have much safer "celebration" type things done for their respective wedding church-exits, like having tiny bells rung or bubbles blown. Thus, Hubby and I never had our revenge upon them for the pelting we endured.

Our first dance, to "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" as sung by Harry Connick, Jr. Great song but not really that danceable, as it turns out. It is "our" song though, one that Hubby used to play for me when he deejayed at the jazz station back when we were in college, despite it not being on the approved playlist.

Cutting the cake! We went with a chocolate cake with raspberry filling, quite delicious but rather a pain to frost with white icing. We also had plain, yellow cake with raspberry filling available for those attendees who didn't like chocolate. We didn't smash it either - we made a pact that we wouldn't, and we fed each other that momentous first bite simultaneously and with decorum to the strains of the Beatles' "When I'm 64" (you know: "will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?").

Seeing as how we got married waaaay back in the early days of the interwebz and before digital photography and/or personal scanners were common, I didn't have any of our wedding photographs on my computer. I dug out our wedding album, which was redone for us by a friend who scrapbooks a few years back, and scanned the above pictures in from that. This is why some have borders or rounded edges or what-have-you, and also why they're not the greatest quality - I didn't want to try removing either the pictures from the album or the protective cover off the page, so I just slapped the album onto the scanner bed as best I could to scan them in. At least now I have some form of them on the computer!

We plan to celebrate not tonight, as Hubby is working late and it is the middle of the week and all, but rather this weekend, when we're going out to eat at Macaroni Grill, with Kiddo, who is fascinated by our wedding album now that she is old enough to sort of understand what a wedding is and also able to remember being a flower girl in her uncle's wedding back in 2007. She is a little upset that we didn't have her as our flower girl, so she's not quite getting the whole concept of "back before you were born" too well right now. At least she gets to go out to celebrate with us this weekend - she loved eating there for my birthday last month!

Anyhow... to get all mushy and sentimental for a moment (hey, it is my blog!), here is one of my favorite poems of all time. I wanted to have the first line - or at the very least, the first phrase - inscribed on the inside of our wedding bands, but both Hubby and the jeweler laughed their heads off at me. We settled for our initials and the date instead. As there are no such space limitations on my blog, I will share the poem in its entirety with you now:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

~ e.e. cummings

Happy anniversary, honey! Thank you for putting up with me and my craziness for these past 14 years!

Three Dozen

My hubby, my best friend, my love, my partner, my rock was born three dozen years ago today. I consider myself to be the luckiest woman to have shared a life with him for over 16 years now. So, shouting it from my cyber-rooftop for all the world to hear:

Happy birthday, honey, I love you!


No one Gets Me But U
by Magne F


Everybody says that I’m too tightly wired
Everyone thinks I’m too high strung
Everyone knows what I should do
But no one gets me

Everyone’s afraid of missing the action
Everybody wants their lives to be touched
Everybody wants to get it together
But no one gets me

Everybody has you over for dinner
But no one really stays in touch
Everyone knows that less is more
But we all want it too much

Everybody says what’s on their mind
But no one really thinks it through
Everyone feels they know what I need
But no one gets me but you

Everybody knows the game is rigged
Everyone says it’s a curse
Everyone knows the asking price
But never what it’s worth

Everyone has too much on their plate
Everyone argues their fate
Everyone knows it’s worth their while
But no one wants to wait

Everybody’s taking it to the streets
But no one brings it home
Everybody needs a helping hand
'Cause nobody walks it alone

Everybody plays to win
'Cause nobody likes to lose
Everyone knows what I must to do
But no one gets me but you

Every dreamer needs a doer to get things done...

No one gets me, no one gets me but you