Halloween Hilarity

From the woman who brought you Savannah Christmas Decorating (http://formerlyitinerantroadie.blogspot.com/2007/12/christmas-tradition.html) comes the next installment of holiday cheer. Hilarious Halloween Decorating!

I snapped most of the these pics while bike riding through the expensive part of the neighborhood.

You can't read the gravestone but its says "together after all these years."

Ah morbidity. It never gets old.

Inflatables: not just for Christmas anymore!

This is the favorite house for budding arachnophobes.

When just one ghost won't do...

Creepy red dude peeking around the tree.

And this is my favorite house. It has a vampire AND a mummy on the front porch, numerous gravestones and pirate skeletons in the yard (thank you "Pirates of the Caribbean", a weird dead clown thing on the tree, and a giant scary thing hanging over the window. If I could have taken more pictures without looking like a stalker, I would have shown you the yellow and red thing blowing in the wind. It practically covered the window when the wind blew! I love other people's holiday excess.

Pumpkin Cookies - so tasty, so easy

Pumpkin Cookies

Prep Time: 20 Minutes

Cook Time: 17 Minutes

Yields: 48 servings

Ingredients
2 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
1 cup white whole wheat flour
¼ cup wheat germ
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
¾ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¾ teaspoon ground cloves
¾ teaspoon salt
¾ cup butter, softened
1 ¼ cups white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
15 oz. can of pumpkin puree
(it’s the standard size can)
2 eggs
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, ground cloves, and salt; set aside.
3. In a medium bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.
4. Add pumpkin, eggs, and vanilla to butter mixture, and beat until creamy.
5. Mix in dry ingredients.
6. Drop on cookie sheet by tablespoonfuls. (You can go larger if you like pumpkin as much as I do, but since the outcome looks a bit “healthy” strangers are uncomfortable taking a bigger cookie.)
7. Bake for 17 minutes in the preheated oven
8. Remove from cookie sheet and cool on a rack
9. You can ice them, if desired, but they’re really quite tasty without.

SUPER TASTY!

Sorry there's no picture, trust me they look healthy, not at all like a tasty cookie. But they are both healthy-ish and tasty.

Late September Fun

I was able to visit Michigan in late September, just in time for my birthday! John had just left on tour for 2 months and the prospect of the first week of empty house was depressing so I took a road trip.

I took 75 up instead of 77 which is apparently 40 miles longer but 10 minutes quicker. All I can say for it is that it involves less mountainous terrain. As any of you who have ridden with me in the mountains know after a few hours it takes a few days for me to convince my shoulders down from my ears. It stresses me out, alot. Not too sure why.
Anyway, I had a nice drive up. Great weather and books on CD are a good way to go. In Kentucky I saw the following:

Imagine the $4/mile that that was costing!

I had a great time catching up with my family and some old friends.
My sister Karen and I took her 3 kids and went to visit my youngest sister Becca. Becca and her husband Alex were in the process of buying a house that they were already living in. It is a very funky cool old house. It is over a hundred years old and had some oddities but plenty of charm. I’m looking forward to seeing pictures of the various renovation projects that they will do! On the way home, Karen and I plotted a garage sale to help the ongoing “cleaning out the old house project”.
I had a lovely birthday dinner with my folks and youngest brother Pete at the family’s perennial favorite Real Seafood Company. Any excuse for seafood! I get the opportunity all the time now due to my proximity to the ocean, but I never turn down good fish!
Quite a bit of hauling things out of the basement, some bedrooms, and closets went on throughout the week. Karen and I had quite a successful garage sale on Saturday morning. We made about $300 on the stuff, but better than that, we got to get rid of many space hogging and never used items. Tim showed up with the kids and Karen’s whole clan had a picnic in the yard and the kids played around. They sure do love a garage sale!

After the sale was over Karen dropped some things at the PTO Thrift shop and put up an E-cycle Notice for the free pile that we left in the yard. Pete and I took some unsold sporting equipment to Play it Again Sports. They took more than half of it, adding another $35 to our total. The only casualty being Dad’s golf shoes that Play it Again took, but that he didn’t realize were on the way out. Bummer, but then again when’s the last time he went golfing? A further stop at the ReUse center netted Pete a turntable and me an emptier car.
Over the weekend some work happened at the new house in the basement. Mom got started on the front door staining and Dad and I chalked out the walls for the unbuilt rooms in the basement. We put up some shelves and shrank the pile of STUFF in the basement.
There were also varied attempts to find some old fashioned cinnamon donuts like you get at the apple orchards or pumpkin patches. Unsuccessful, I might add. So we had to settle for Fragels. For those of you uninitiated, a fragel is a cinnamon raisin bagel that is fried like a donut and then rolled in cinnamon sugar. Tasty!
The folks and I had dinner with Karen, Tim and the kids the night before I headed home. They were hilarious, as usual.
On the way home I got a picture of the most entertaining thing along 75. In between Cincinnati and Dayton there is a church that has really gone the extra mile. This picture isn't very good, but it really is an enormous concrete Jesus rising out of a lake! Home again home again, I have been busy with the markets and a union call this past Sunday. Disney Live is the heaviest kids’ show I’ve ever put together and taken apart. I’m a little sore today, but the payout will be worth it. The lowest rate all day was time and a half, and at times it got up to triple time! Sweet!