blackmoondog

This has been a pretty garden themed weekend.

Saturday I went out to a public sale at a wholesale nursery and had a nice chat with the grower and picked up some plants and gourds. After that I drove to Cambria to check out the "Gathering of Gardeners" at Cambria Nursery & Florist. I sat in on a talk on personalizing garden design and had tea & scones at the nursery. They had a lot of really great stuff there. I came home with more plants and more ideas for the front yard.

Since I was still feeling somewhat motivated this morning, I got out the pile of garden plans that I've been drawing up over the past, oh, *year and 9 months* since we pulled out the old front lawn. *FINALLY*, the plan has been refined to the point that I'm happy with it. Mark and I spent at least an hour out in the yard going over it and tweaking it a little bit more and now I'm ready to just get the darn thing started. Of course, now that means it is gonna rain for the next few days despite us only having a 20% chance of rain.

What I did do was buy 15 cubic feet of compost and 140lbs of sand (all on the porch to keep it out of the impending rain) to set the step stones. I also dressed up the yard for Halloween. :) I picked up some foam headstones on sale the other day since we already had a couple mounds in the yard from the veggie gardening. I set those up and cut eyes and a mouth out of a garbage bag to staple to the wine barrel in the yard so it looks like a jack-o-lantern. On Halloween itself, I'm gonna pull out my shepherd's hooks and hang luminarias on them along the edge of the walkway. Oh, and our plastic skeleton, Mike, is hanging on the front door. I love Halloween.

I've been watching Lost every day since Friday after having borrowed the Season 1 dvds from friends.

I'd been able to keep it to 4 episodes (one dvd) per day. Until tonight. I watched the 3rd disc and then was compelled to put in the next one and I ended up watching one more. Part of what keeps me from watching them faster is that I don't like watching it right before going to bed. The credits and music creep me out!

At least I don't have to fly anywhere any time soon...

Unfortunately, I poked around the show's website and ended up finding out that a particular character dies. Now I keep waiting for him to be mortally wounded. No more websites for me, until I catch up to the current season!!! (So no comments referring to anything past the 13th episode in Season 1!)

*sigh* Well, at least I'll get plenty of knitting done.

I've finally succumbed to the creeping ick that Mark picked up last week at work. But today instead of staying home and cuddling with my good friend nyQuil, I sucked it up and went to work.

Why?

Because I am in sunny, cool California. With electricity. And gas in my car. An internet connection. Food in the cupboard. Drinkable water in the pipes.

My coworker (whose work tasks I've picked up on top of my already overfilled workload) lives near Ft. Lauderdale. Florida. She is also sick, as are 2 of her 3 children and soon her husband. While their home is still nearly intact (the patio furniture flew away or was otherwise destroyed when Wilma blew through earlier this week), she has no electricity and may not for another *three weeks*. They just got the water back on (after 5 days without running water) but it is non-potable. They have 1/4 of a tank of gas left in their car, despite waiting in line at the station for 2 hours (and getting nothing). Their food supplies are running low and while the older children are coping, the toddler is going bonkers because she's sick and completely without her normal routine. When we got off the phone, they were gonna head further north with hopes of finding an open gas station where they could refill their tank and ATMS that were working so they could get money to buy food and other supplies. The only thing that has been working the whole time has been her phone service so at least they've been able to communicate with the outside world.

Yeah... My day has been pretty easy...

Tonight I made my first ever cake batter from scratch! I decided that I would make the Chocolate Pumpkin cupcakes from the October issue of Country Living magazine. I'm making the cream cheese frosting that they put with it but I'm probably gonna leave out the orange juice & zest.

Now I have a metric buttload of chocolatey cupcakes (that don't taste pumpkiny at all!!! This distresses me greatly since I went through the trouble to make the pumpkin puree from scratch too). The recipe was supposed to make 36 cupcakes, which was way too many to begin with, but it actually made 42! And I was filling the baking cups about twice as high as the recipe instructed!!! Also, I think I inhaled about half a cup of cocoa powder during the batter making process. I expect to be sneezing chocolate for the next few days.

Originally the plan was to take the cupcakes to work tomorrow for Halloween. Now it looks like I'll be taking them to my work (there are only gonna be 6 of us!), some neighbors, maybe Mark's work... If you want a cupcake, let me know and I'll see about setting some aside. I'll be in SLO until 2pm and then heading to the Bay Area on Tuesday afternoon.

I wrenched myself away from Lost just in time to carve my pumpkins before it got dark this evening.

Martha Stewart was right! A keyhole saw is the bizz-omb for carving pumpkins. I carved all three of these in about half an hour. My gutting was a bit sloppier than usual but I'm still pretty impressed. I will never use a kitchen knife or rinky-dink carving kit again!!! I still need to toast the seeds (heck, I still need to separate most of the seeds from the goop). I waited because it was really hot in the house. I could probably do it now tho.

BTW, the stacked pumpkins were two that I grew in my front yard this season! I can't wait until next summer (note that in the history books folks, it won't likely be heard again -- I really dislike most things about summer) so I can plant other varieties of pumpkin!

Everybody hail to the Pumpkin King!