Happy Halloween, blogland! Guess how many trick or treaters we had tonight? Zero. Guess how much candy we had for the non-existent trick or treaters? A lot (see exhibit A above). And to put the icing on our lame-filled cake, our heavily decorated neighbors had about 12 kiddos drop by, while we were sadly kid-less. Looks like someone in this house will be having a stomach ache tonight!
Speaking of stomach ache, have you ever tried Pioneer Women’s country fried steak? We decided to cook this up tonight and in the words of my husband, “ohhhh mama”. It literally feels like a ton of bricks in your stomach after about 20 minutes, but it’s totally worth it. I promise we don’t eat like this all of the time, either – some days you just have to have an incredibly unhealthy meal.
A funny little story about our Halloween decorations this year. I’m not the biggest Halloween fan. I’m not against the holiday or anything – I just don’t tend to decorate the abode until Christmas time comes around. We decided to take Charlie up to the park this morning to get a bit of wearing him out running in, and what do you know? Someone had dropped about 30 little pumpkins near a storm drain. What would possess a person to leave a heap of perfectly adequate pumpkins at a neighborhood park?I tried to figure this out while I looked at the loot, and decided that this person was giving me a golden opportunity – free decor! I could have brought home enough pumpkins to lure 100 trick or treaters to our house, but I decided to just bring 3 home to jazz up our front stoop a little bit. They look quite nice next to our new little mums as well.
I’m hoping these flowers will stand the test of time like our geraniums did last year. Evidently mums are very low maintenance and do well in cooler temperatures, so it sounds like the perfect companion to my very black thumb.
On another note, with the cooler weather trickling in, the leaves are really starting to cover our front yard. Every year we loathe the days when we have to rake/mulch/bag the immense amount of dead leaves and we’re always trying to find a way to streamline the process. This year we’re attempting to blow the leaves a few times to a staging area on our driveway, and then spending one long afternoon bagging everything once the trees are dry.
My idea to “streamline the process” was to hire someone to pick up our leaves. For some reason Scott didn’t seem to jump on that bandwagon. Does anyone out there have a less painful approach to gathering leaves that we should know about? We’re not quite used to this arduous process yet, since we both have Floridian roots (where Christmas day consists of shorts and 80 degree weather). Anyhow, hope everyone has a great Halloween and is enjoying the beginnings of Fall!
P.S. Halfway through writing this post, we did indeed get some trick or treaters. Scott was so excited and told them to take as much as they want (rookie mistake) and they proceeded to clean out our entire candy bowl in 5 seconds like a pack of rabid dogs. Oh, and one of them was dressed as Prince, the Purple Rain era. Hilarious!
*A reader asked for the recipe for the country fried steak. I used Pioneer Woman’s cookbook, but it seems like the recipe is here on her site as well. To make the gravy, just add some flour and milk to the leftover grease in your skillet. Disgusting but delicious!
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(I couldn’t take a picture of it because it was being washed. From me wearing the heck out of it). I confess: my coworker bought this dress first, and I immediately wanted it. Apparently I’ve had some unhealthy obsessions with clothing items this year, but that’s another topic. I may have mentioned this dress to a certain mother-in-law and what do you know? Santa Claus brought it to me. It’s the most comfortable, most flattering dress in all of existence and you should buy it immediately. Oh, and it comes in petite too.
I’ve learned that any gift that was made by hand is a thousand times better than something bought from a store. Don’t get me wrong, anything from Anthropologie is always welcomed with open arms, but a gift like this or something else that took a little time on the part of the giver is a win in my book. Any other DIY gifts out there that you’d like to share?
