Some things just aren't as fun.... without the kids

Hallowe'en for instance.

Tonight, Terry and I carved pumpkins and I roasted the seeds. We have done this together since the kids were very little. There have been many many Halloween weekends that we have carved as many as 10 large pumpkins in a day. But... like all good things, those days come to an end. This year, we carved one each. Mine is fairly simple, and one of my favorites. Terry's is always pretty complicated, cause he has way more patience.these are the finished pumpkins.... but here is Terry's in progress.

SEEDS

I have two different recipes that I have used for years and years. One half of the family (and Jill) prefer the Peppy hot ones, and the other half of the family enjoy the Seasoned ones. They taste more like bits and bites, where the Peppy ones are more peppery.

Peppy Pumpkin Seeds

2 cups cleaned pumpkin seeds

2 Tbsp butter or Margarine

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cumin

1/2 tsp chili pepper

1/2 tsp black pepper

Seasoned Pumpkin Seeds

2 cups cleaned pumpkin seeds

2 Tbsp butter or Margarine

1 tsp salt1 tsp celery Salt

1 tsp Garlic Powder
2 Tsp Worcestershire

Melt the butter an add spices. Add seeds and stir until well coated. Spread thinly on a cookie sheet and roast in 300 degrees oven for 50 minutes. Stirring every 10 minutes.

ETCHING...with Twila

Here it is .... Saturday... my favorite day of the week.!

Today I was artsie with Robin. We attended an "Etching" class with Twila Robar-DeCoste . She is a pretty amazing artist, with a very quaint home in Aylesford just seconds from exit 16. There were 4 of us as students.. One gentleman, Howard or Harold, I can't remember and another very quiet woman named Julianne (I think, ugh). The gentleman arrived with a box of supplies, while Robin and I arrived with nothing. We weren't aware of needing supplies and as it turns out, he was just a big ole keener!!! Twila provided us with all our supplies (and a cup of tea and sweets) and we had a lovely afternoon, in an amazingly adorable house. If you go to her website, you will see a lovely painting she did of her home. I would include it on my blog, but it is copyrighted, so I can't. You'll have to go visit her site to see it.

This is Robin working on her vase. It has an Iris on the front. It is pretty cool to do, and the hardest part is the cutting on the glass. But that comes with practice. That's the part that requires "talent".

Our Keener Gentleman friend did a vase at first but then he brought his own glass, his own "bluenose" pattern and he did this as his second piece.... gheesh... keener!
I did some Holly Leaves on a green square vase.... This is the acid compound you put on your glass once you cut out your design and have it on the glass in a negative form. My vase is cute, and I did two holly patterns, one on each side of the vase. The picture doesn't do it much justice. It turned out pretty sweet....

Friday Foolishness

This really is so funny, and so true. If anyone reading owns a cat, you surely have had mornings or middle of the nights like this.

Its the weekend.... I can't believe it. First off, the week flew by so fast and secondly it was the longest week of the year. Can that really be!!!! I did some new accounting training this week via telephone in the middle of my Grand Central Station office. What a nightmare, but its over, and I learned lots. I had a visit from one of the upper management to see how my records are kept etc, and that went well. I am "A" personality at work (not at home) so I wasn't too worried about that visit. She did bring me a chocolate ghost as a treat, for helping two of our other school secretaries who need constant contact to get them through little things. Its so hard for them to reach the Upper Management, so I offered to be their life line... Helps me learn too when I am walking them through things. Today, I spent 6 hours in EXCEL training which I already have extensive training in. But it was the lesser of several evils as far as PD training choices go for Secretaries. Today was Provincial Conference Day which means that every employee of the School System in this province is at some sort of Personal Development through out the province. Anyway, back to Excel.... I learned tons of little shortcuts today that I probably never paid attention to in any other course, because there were so many things I needed to learn. So today I learned Excel Validation, Worksheet formula combining and a few cool quick items. I can't wait to get to work on Monday to play around!!

Yesterday, at school was WEAR PINK FOR PEACE day. And I have the best picture of our whole school in action.... it was fun and heartwarming at the same time! The whole theme of Pink day came from our neighbouring high school "Central Kings". During the first week of school, one of the male students who was knew to the school (grade 9) happen to wear a pink tee shirt to school. During the day, some of the other kids made fun of him and even did some bullying. A few of the grade 12 students didn't like this, and wanted to show their support for the grade 9 boy who happened to like wearing pink. These older boys started a movement throughout the whole school and with in three days they had enough support that they proclaimed that Friday (Sept 7th) Pink Day and almost the entire school wore Pink tee shirts or at the very least pink armbands. How proud are we of Central Kings students to send a message to the world.... we say NO to bullying and YES to peace. Oct 25 was our Peace Day at Kingston School!!!

My Fall Garden

May 2007

Planting

August 2007

Harvesting

October 2007

Garden gone

A little sad to see it go...

but I was getting a bit sick of it too, if the truth be told.

Time for a prayer.... for a friend & his son.

Meet Isaac, who is 11 years old.

His dad is Rob and Rob worked at my school for the past 4 years. Just this school year, he made the decision to move to another school to be closer to his kids. Change is hard, but being closer to home and in the same school as his two oldest kids was a pretty good call. Rob is well loved by our staff and greatly missed.

Early last week, Isaac was diagnosed with Leukemia and is currently at the IWK, starting some pretty aggressive treatments. I am so glad you made that choice to move to KCA. Once Isaac is back to school, you are only a walk away!!! My thoughts are with you every day Rob, and Isaac!

Fabo Fall day

The Jelly is made. Thanks to Debbie's recipe which I called her at least 3 times over the past week to discuss, and then didn't have it on Saturday and thank heavens, I went with my memory (which I don't usually trust). On Thursday I turned the grapes from my neighbour into juice and then on Saturday turned all of the juice to Jelly. I made two patches but one set better than the other. Weird... I used everything exactly the same and it was 30 minutes between batches!!! Oh well. Grapes... Concord..basically growing wild and organic.... very tart!!

Mashed and boiling for 10 minutes

In the cheese cloth (couldn't find the jelly bags, Debbie, so the cheese cloth was fine)

The Jelly

(well, not all of it, I have already brought two jars to Howard... the owner of the vines)


The Leaves.... they are amazing to look at, I can't tell you how much I love all the colors.

BUT.... Terry has a whole different view of them.
Even the cats seem a bit disgusted with the constant leave litter in the yard.This is after the first raking, this morning (while I was at church). Dad took great pleasure in announcing to Terry, every time a new leaf fell on his freshly raked lawn. Dad and Terry have different theories on when to rake (you know, after the last leave has fallen, or several times during the falling season, to lighten the load).

Well, that's my Sunday Blog. I am trying to blog daily, to keep up with Stephanie. So tomorrow, I will have some garden pictures.... yes, the last ones of the season.... I will give you a hint, I whole lot of **nothing** goin' on in garden.

I LOVE SATURDAYS

I think I have said that before..... but it is really true. For me, Saturdays are a gift. I usually leave my Saturdays for things I need to do. Its a morning I can sleep in, although, I don't sleep in much, but it is so nice to NOT have to get up at 6am. I can wake up at 6:30, toss and turn, think about what I should and need to do, dose off, wake up and its 7:30.

I made a list of a ton of things to do today, and I bet I will get about half done! But that's ok too. I woke up this morning and decided to clean up stuff. I mean, deep (under and behind) cleaning. My ugly laundry room had a flood yesterday due to a dry sheet getting stuck where it doesn't belong (& a blind father doing his own laundry, bless his heart). Terry mopped up what he could at noon hour yesterday but this morning I migrated down the stairs with all the laundry (remember...deep cleaning), sheets, towels, shower curtains, dish cloths, bath mats, jackets hanging on door knobs (mostly mine) etc.

My laundry room is now piled with laundry, but all the brooms, mops, dustpans, empty laundry bottles, old mops heads, plastic containers etc are all where they are suppose to be. The "temporary" junk that ends up on the floor in front of the shelving, is now shelved. The kitty litters are emptied, cleaned out and replenished (remember the flood... ok, everything was soaked including the kitty litter pans) The floors are javexed and hand dried and the freezer is piled with all my sorted dirty laundry, all lined up for its particular turn. Now that was a good job done!

This afternoon, Grape Jelly (2 batches). My neighbour Howard has grapes growing through his trees in the back yard and brought me over a grocery bag full of concords. So, on Thursday night while chatting on the phone with Debbie, I boiled them down into juice, and today..... Grape Jelly!!!

Also, this afternoon, Cabbage Rolls. Well, the new healthier version of them. Actually, I think my Cabbage Rolls are very healthy to start with, but now we need to watch the sodium content besides the usual sugar & fat. Ugh. Well, canned tomato anything is amazingly high in sodium so we are now looking at the "no salt added" stuff. Should be kind of interesting and we will see how they turn out. Usually when I make cabbage rolls, its a good time to make a nice chicken & cabbage soup that i like to take to school for lunches, so that is on the list and I use the centers of the cabbage (cause the leaves are too small to make MAN size cabbage rolls out of).

I love this picture.....

I took it with Joan's swanky camera during our Thanksgiving Golf Walk and Talk, and I had to lean over a river bank over hang, and I tried to get the river. But the fancy camera had some sort of auto focus thing happenin' and this is what I ended up with. Pretty cool, I think. This was the same day, same camera. So simple