Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Ghosts of (some) Halloweens Past

It's times like this when I wish I was more like Ellie, with her neatly categorized photo albums available within arm's reach. My electronic photos are pretty well organized, at least since 2005 or so. But this morning's search for a legacy of Halloween fodder produced just one random early photo in an old flickr (formerly kodak gallery, formerly ofoto) album.

Look at my baby boy dressed up as an...er... enthusiastic elephant.  

2000
Awwwww! Efalant.

Now imagine the next few years as a blur of cuteness in the form of Simba, a cougar, and various unfortunate disney characterizations... oh wait... Buzz and Woody:


2002? I'm pretty sure it wasn't even Halloween, but AWWWWWWW.

and then
2003 or 2004. The belly. the mugs. I die.
probably 2005 - Mimi made these costumes for them!
 
2006 - my girl had to decide between a white or a black unitard for this outfit. Once she chose, she announced to anyone who asked that she was dressed as "a black rock star."

2007. Inexplicable green hair.

2008 - commence dark years. Note the recycled cheerleader costume from last year!

2009. Awww? He won a trophy for that shit.

2010: fave.

2011- really pretty awesome. I spent an inordinate amount of time on her shoes, which you can't even see.
What will tonight bring????

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Spooning does not necessarily lead to forking

Now that I've checked on the status of Sandy and her effects on Ellie, Mom Corey and MB, I can get on to writing this frivolous post...ready? Here we go...

I brought all sorts of things back with me from my uncle's home after his death. Piles of old photographs, antique suitcases, a pearl necklace and earring set of my grandmother's, and more. But my mom transported the family silverware for me, and brought it over one day last month.

She uncerimonioulsy put the blackish silver forks, spoons and serving pieces in a small drawer. They were overwhelmingly tarnished, so dark and brackish that I didn't open that drawer for weeks. But I had spied a particularly gorgeous spoon, its beauty shining even through  its ominous verneer, and last week I cracked open the drawer to find it.

What I found was interesting. Instead of a set of family silverware, you know, one pattern with 8 spoons, salad forks, forks, knives and serving pieces, there were instead just a few pieces of many, many different silver patterns. The majority of which were spoons.

There were 12 different spoon patterns!

 12!
There was only a single spoon of  many patterns, two of some others, and a few had three or four.

And somehow, one of my maternal grandmother's spoons ended up in there, which made my top 3.

Isn't that a gorgeous flower? You can't see the delicate EH engraved in there or the 1906 on the back, but they're there too.
 I am also particularly fond of this one.

Love the simple, delicate daisies with the masculine engraved F.
And this next one, well this next one is my favorite spoon ever. I mean, my favorite spoon ever in the history of the world. Luckily too, there are 3 of these.


It's a lily, and there is a gorgeous lily on the back too. Love, love love.
 I love so much, in fact, that I swore to myself that I would find a daily use for this spoon. I thought I could use it with my morning tea, although, really, I don't stir my tea much. Or simply keep it with the daily flatware and use it whenever I'm personally in need of a spoon. But this plan has its drawbacks; you see my roommate is a little crazy, and likes to play with random household objects, which don't always find their way back to their rightful place. So still thinking....

And then yesterday, while working checking out Pinterest, it all fell into place. I have the perfect solution.

My baby is going to be a ring! Now how perfect is that???

Monday, October 29, 2012

Frankenstorm

We're on High Alert around here.

You may have heard? The Perfect Storm of the Century is bearing down on us, and all we can do, over here on the Entire East Coast, is obsess over the increasingly dramatic and terrifying charts and graphs weather.com keeps putting us to torment us.

Right?

I mean, they're pretty . . .

. . . but they're terrifying . . .





Here's my favorite:

Sigh. All we can do is pick our peppers . . .

. . . and stock our larders:

What can I tell you? We ran out of coffee once.
Never again.

. . . and watch the sky . . .

. . . and drink Guinness . . .

. . . and marvel when the sun comes out . . .

. . . and check out our neighbors' houses . . .

. . . and watch the water . . .

. . . and worry. Oh how I worry. Nervosa.

No, I'm not worried so much about our deck . . .

. . . No, I'm worried about what looms high above our deck.

Sigh.

Wish us luck.

Friday, October 26, 2012

into the green

Where was I?

Oh yeah 

The girls and I left our rainy gray day adventure in Julian in search of greener pastures.
 

Green, you say? You want green?



Oh I got your green right here.


We picked green apples! Can you stand it?


It was so fun, so different and interesting and awesome.

And so very hard to resist snatching up (down) every perfect apple we spied with our little eyes,  way up high




Have you ever seen anything more adorable in your entire life?


We paid $1/pound for what we hauled out, but we were invited to eat for free in the orchard



I might have found a new happy place

There's a perfect caption for this photo out there somewhere in the world

The Alpacas are skeptical