Happy Halloween, sugar and all!!

We've had a fun couple of days getting the pumpkins carved and the costumes finished. Joey used his wizard robe from last year and went as a Sith Lord from Star Wars. Tim went as Gilligan-the boys recently watched all three seasons of Gilligan's Island and Tim LOVED it. Holly wore her ceramic horns to work which were a huge hit. The class Steve works in spent most of the day doing Halloween related activities including eating Zombie fingers (rice crispy treats rolled into fingers with candy corn nails) and feeling Zombie brains (a bowl of cold spaghetti.) Tonight we trick-or-treated at the businesses along Woodstock Blvd, had some pizza and then came home to trick-or-treat in the neighborhood. The boys had a great time, ate some candy, and complained that they couldn't eat it all. Well, mostly it was Tim who complained anyway.

Can't blog now, too busy

In fact crazy busy right now. We decided to sell our house since so many houses are for sale in the area we'd love to move into. But since we hadn't been planning this for long there are a LOT of projects to get done. You'd think from all the lack of sleep lately (hmmmm, stress related?) every little job would be finished, but not quite yet. It will all work out and hopefully one of the houses we've fallen in love with will still be on the market when ours sells. Fingers crossed.

I snapped a picture of Holly washing the windows. If only all the projects were that easy!

Home Again

After being away for four and a half years, the Red Bowling Ball of Love has finally returned.
Yup, you read it right. When we moved out of our house on Tolman Street the Red Bowling Ball of Love was mistakenly left behind under the lilac tree. We didn't realize this until it was too late. We tried to get our friends who lived across the street to retrieve it for us, but it never quite happened.

The shortened history is: Steve gave this to Holly, the first gift he ever bought her (.50 at a Goodwill store in Eugene.) It traveled with Holly to camp in Idaho, with us to Philadelphia and back to Oregon, and became lawn art when we moved to Tolman Street.

Today we heard that an artist was now living in our old house and she was showing her work in the shed out back. This was part of a city wide event where artists opened their studios to show their work.

We visited and the artist, Kari Dunham. She was very nice, had some beautiful paintings, talked to the boys about art and did a charcoal sketch to show them how she did some of her work.

Before we left I asked for a favor: would she mind if we took the bowling ball with us-if she wasn't too attached to it. Not quite the favor she was expecting to be asked, in fact she was rather amused. She didn't mind at all so we picked it up and for now it's sitting outside by our front door.

-Steve

Fall Beach Trip

We went to Manzanita for the weekend and rented an odd little house a block from the beach. We had a great time, the sun was out and it wasn't too windy. When we weren't down on the beach walking around (or re-routing streams) we were playing games and reading up at the house. The boys watched a little TV too, Sponge Bob is too irresistible.

Last Summer Ride

As part of a fund raiser Holly and I bought Joe a slot on the ice cream bike ride that some teachers at school hosted. It was rained out last June, and rescheduled for a couple weekends ago (I'm a little slow posting the picture.)
He had a great ride with the teachers and five or six classmates that went along. They rode over the Hawthorne bridge and to an ice cream shop on the west side. They had great weather and Joe loved it.