Showing posts with label pumpkins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pumpkins. Show all posts

Saturday, October 25, 2014

Fall cleanup and football

Beautiful Fall Day

By this time last year, we had left Michigan for the warmer weather in the southwest . . . but this year, we’ll be around a little bit longer.  Nicolas has a few more weeks until he “ships out”, so we’ll stick around until he’s gone.  Then we’ll make a beeline for Florida!

We had frost a few mornings this past week, but for the most part, the weather hasn’t been too bad.  The guys have been keeping busy with fall cleanup in the campground, and thankfully this week we had a few dry days and they were able to make a pretty good dent in the leaves.

Working Hard

It's been a long day

 

They’ve worked enough hours to pay for our site for October and November, and electric for September, October and November . . . now they’re working toward next year (or a refund of September’s site rent, if I get my way).

 

There are still some trees with leaves on them, and some of the areas they clear end up covered again a day later . . . including our site!  For the most part, though, it’s looking pretty good around here!

 

Beautiful Fall Day

Bryce has quickly mastered the art of driving a stick shift, as he loads up the Ranger with leaves and drives to to the back of the campground to dump them.

Picking up the leaves

When I got home from work on Thursday, they had been hard at work since noon . . . and they kept at it until almost 7pm!  Bryce was feeling pretty tired . . .

Bryce is tired

and Friday they were back at it again, although I made them stop at 5:00, so we could have dinner at a more reasonable hour.

The boys did find time this week to carve their pumpkins . . .

Scary Pumpkins

(Can you guess which one is Bryce’s?) . . . and last night we picked up lights to go in them.

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Bryce wants to wrap his light in green tissue paper so his pumpkin glows green!     Casey looks like Rudolph!

 

Casey got a new light for her collar, too, and when I took her picture, it was at the perfect angle to make her look like Rudolph!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As a Millenicom customer for the last two years, we were shocked like everybody else to abruptly receive an email stating that our account has been acquired by Verizon, and we’re still waiting to see what that means for us.  We have our phones on Straight Talk (2 using Verizon and 1 using AT&T), and we aren’t really anxious to jump back onto the Verizon bandwagon for internet.

We’ve got very good wifi at this campground (better than we were getting with Millenicom), and the RV Park we’re going to be at in Florida for the winter provides hard-wired internet to the site, so I think we’re just going to let our internet service lapse until Spring.  Then we can assess what’s available and decide which way to go.

Last night I finished scanning my albums of Nick & Bryce’s baby pictures.  It was a pretty simple process with my new Brother DS-620 portable scanner.  It works really well with pictures . . . I just group photos by month, and continuously feed them into the scanner.  The program automatically saves each one to the designated folder with the file name I select, with a three-digit number added to the end of the filename (image 001, image002 . . . ).  It takes about 8 seconds per photo.

This was my Throwback Thursday photo this week . . . it seemed appropriate with today’s football game!

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Bryce didn’t look too happy with that T-shirt we had on him!

Today is the big rivalry game between Michigan State and the University of Michigan.

Watching the Big Game

We made Spartan jello to taunt the U of M fans in the family!

Spartan Jello

The game is almost over, and MSU has a huge lead, so I guess Bryce is going to be the happy one in the family!

Monday, October 20, 2014

Visiting the Pumpkin Patch

Gust Farms -- Pumpkin Patch

Last year, Nicolas was upset that he never got a pumpkin for Halloween, so he was determined to get one this year.  Sunday was a nice day, so after picking up Grandma to go out to my sister’s house, we stopped on the way at a local Pumpkin Patch.

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There were lots of wagons full of pumpkins to choose from, but the boys wanted to pick their own, so we headed out into the pumpkin patch.

Still a lot to choose from!

The Donut Barn . . . we'll be back here!

We left Grandma in the donut barn to wait for us while the guys searched for the perfect pumpkins.

Looking for a good jack-o-lantern

Bryce has a design in his head already, so he carefully studied each pumpkin to see if it would fit.

Hmm . . . what can I carve on here?

While they searched, I took some nice fall pictures.

Pumpkins

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Soon they had looked at enough, and settled on their perfect pumpkins.

Looking for the perfect pumpkin

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Tom even found one for us to carve!

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We probably should have brought a wagon into the patch!  Oh well, the boys are strong, and they carried all three pumpkins back to the donut barn where Grandma was waiting with donuts and cider.

We found three good ones!

From the pumpkin patch, we continued to my sister’s house where we met up with another sister & brother-in-law, and my brother to go to their church’s Fall Festival.  We had a delicious turkey and roast beef dinner, bought some chances on gift baskets, and played a few games of bingo . . . Nicolas won $2, and Danny won $1.50 . . . OK, not real big prizes!

On the way out, we stopped for a photo-op with Pope Francis.

pope francis

Back at Tina’s house, the boys got to play cards for awhile, and we all enjoyed the apple pie that Donnie made . . . although we barely had room for it after that dinner!