Sunday Stills Challenge - Halloween

This weeks SSC was anything having to do with Halloween so I've decided to showcase my mad pumpkin carvin' skillz. And the fact that I'm a 28 year old Twitard. Ya...



So I had some girlfriends over for the Great Pumpkin Carving Adventure 2009 a couple weeks ago and this is what we came up with.

All very cute and all totally different. Love it! Can you guess which one is mine?

Yep, I'm the twitard, complete with vampire fangy smile and all. In my defense, there was alcohol involved, but probably not enough to make this acceptable. I also may have been breaking in my Edward/Jacob tshirt that night, but there are no pictures to prove it.

So here I go, outing myself to the world with my Twitard pumpkin sitting on my porch. Only you can't see my porch from the road, so no one knows. Except you. And all the good people that read Twitarded, because I apparently made JJ and STY's day when I sent it to them so they posted it there as well. Eeks!

All righty then. I think that's enough embarrassing myself for one evening. Hope you all had a happy Halloween! And we're into the teens for the countdown to New Moon! YEEHAW!

Sunday Stills Challenge - Landscapes and Fall Foliage

I love fall! I love watching trees turn and seeing all the colors. It's my favorite time of year. Other then the frosty mornings. I'm really not ready for frost and cold again. It seems like we were just here.

Regardless, the colors are beautiful. Unfortunately, the weather and my schedule did not cooperate this week at all. It has been cloudy and gray all week so that combined with the 20 seconds of daylight I have when I get home from work, getting pics for this challenge just wasn't looking promising. Then yesterday I got lucky! It was still cloudy and foggy most of the morning, but when I came home from running some errands I noticed the mountain was peeking out just enough and the sun was shining on this lone little maple tree at the bottom of our property. Of course the tree is somewhat past it's color turning glory, but I think it's still pretty.

Happy fall!

Sunday Stills Challenge - Signs of Fall

Well, due to some technical difficulties, I'm getting this up a little late. Darn computers! Here are some signs of fall from my neck of the woods...

First off, we have all of my pots and hanging baskets drying out, turning brown, dying...

Though that may have more to do with me being in "fall mode" which does not include watering plants. Oops!

Our ponies are all shedding their nice, short summer coats and getting a little fuzzier...

They are also getting very hair chinny chin chins. Atleast before they got clipped for the show this weekend!

And is it just me or is there really way more of these guys hanging around in the fall time? They seem to be every where! Ick!

The leaves are starting to change...

And a sure sign of fall at my house is mushrooms. There were a bunch that popped up when we had a week or two of cooler, cloudy weather, but of course the last week has been sunny and hot so they all disappeared, except for these little guy. We really do get quite the variety of mushrooms all around our house in the fall though.

Happy fall to everyone!

So many projects...

...so little time! It always seems that there just aren't enough hours in the day for everything that I'd like to do. That's become incredibly apparent lately with these gorgeous, sunny, crisp fall days just calling my name, but only having an hour or two after work to enjoy them before it gets dark. It's torture I tell you! It's just not possible to squeeze chores, yard maintenance, yard/property projects and riding ponies into the small window of time that I have outside while it's light out. Something has to give, and lately it's been my pony time.

Generally speaking, giving up pony time is not a good thing. Riding horses is my therapy! Both mental and physical. It keeps me sane, relieves stress and makes up for the 8+ hours a day I spend sitting in a chair slouched over. My back can always tell when I don't ride. It starts screaming at me sooner or later if I'm slacking. It needs the exercise and balance of sitting up straight and working the horses to make up for my awful posture at work and the hour and a half minimum that I spend in my truck every working day. Luckily being on a drill team with weekly practices gets me on my horse for a good, solid two hours one night a week. No matter how much I whine and complain when it's time to leave for practice, I always feel 100% better when it's done. There is just no therapy quite like riding a horse.

The last couple of weeks I've been having tons of fun working on yard and house projects, so I've hardly had time to miss riding. Atleast not too much. I've been suddenly inspired to tackle a few projects outside before the weather turns for the year and it's been a lot of fun. We have 4.3 acres, most of which was wooded when we bought the house. There are some very odd flower beds around the house, garage and gate. The one by the garage had a lovely (at one time I'm sure) huge rose bush that was very, very dead and had the most evil thorns every where on it. That little flower bed area also had a huge, mostly dead shrubby thing. I believe my friend told me it was Juniper? Not sure, I don't know plant names. It was also prickly and evil. I decided to tackle that project one sunny weekend day while the boyfriend was off hunting for Bambi.

Unfortunately, I didn't take "before" pictures of it with the dead stuff still there, but here is what it looked like after I yanked all the crappy old dead stuff out (ok, more like waged a war against their prickly evil-ness), except the big root for the shrubby thing (don't you just love all the technical terms?) that I could not get out of the ground to save my life! The previous owners also put plastic or fabric EVERYWHERE! It has been a huge PITA (pain in the a$$) and doesn't seem to do much of anything in the way of actually keeping weeds down. The little fence was the border with the mostly dead shrub thing growing thru it and just looking gross.

I had planned to do paver blocks every where around the house. Bordering all the flower bed areas and making for a very nice look. I knew that would be some time in the future, like maybe after we win the lottery or something, since paver blocks and a nice yard just aren't at the top of the list of projects to pay for. I kept dreaming about it though, trying to picture what it will look like someday. Then one sunny Sunday I woke up and thought, rocks! I'll use rocks! Duh! We are VERY successful rock farmers since we cleared the property and I need to pick them out of the turn out area and arena anyways. Best of all they are FREE so why not kill like 5 birds with one stone?!

I like the overall look of the rock border, but I do realize that this was my first attempt and it does need some help. I have also decided that I need to fill it with some more dirt, bring it up level with the concrete, and raise the edge of the border a little bit more. I planted a couple tulip bulbs in there, but that's about it for a while. As I've mentioned, flower beds aren't at the top of the projects to pay for list. Any money we spend on things like flowers and plants, is that much less money that we have to spend on things like arena footing, stalls or our tack room. Those are definately priorities for me.

Eventually, I'd like to have some sort of tree or taller, not evil shrub against the building that will take up some of that empty wall space. Then I would like to find some sort of ground cover that is colorful and fun, but also low maintenance. I like things that bloom and I love having lots of color around the house, but I don't like yard work or things that are high maintenance. It takes away from my pony time. The name of the game for me when it comes to gardening and yard work is low maintenance!

So that was the first project that I have tackled and finished. It is very minor considering all that I have to do still, but it's a start! This is my next project. It's a strange little "flower bed" area, minus the flowers I guess, that seems to be centered around the lamp post and over all sorts of interesting, random things that I assume is wiring and stuff for the gate and lights at the entrance or may have been part of the gate at some point. I've already made a lot of progress on it, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to finish it before I run out of nice weather. Fingers crossed!

I love fall!

I really love fall! I think it is my favorite season. The weather isn't always ideal, but it is just so gosh darn pretty! How can you not love fall?! I do love summer to, definately prefer summer weather. I'm very much a warm weather kinda gal, but the summers just seem to evaporate. I'm always so busy with horse shows and various other activities that seem to only happen during the summer that before I know it, it's all over and I didn't really get to enjoy it much at all. Because of that, fall is my favorite season. It is beautiful and I actually get time to enjoy it! I can relax a bit and take the time to observe and appreciate all of the pretty colors and the cool, crisp weather and the wonderful sunny days, crunching thru the fallen leaves on my horse. I could do without the frosty mornings and the 6 pm (or earlier) sunsets, but other then that, it's glorious.

I also love Halloween and pumpkins and Thanksgiving and hot (usually hard) apple cider and all the other fun things that come with fall. I still love carving pumpkins and it's just not fall for me without that tradition. I wasn't terribly impressed with my carving abilities this year though. My winking pumpkin ended up looking quite a bit retarded and lop-sided. Oh well, you can't win 'em all.

I'm a huge fan of just about anything pumpkin flavored. Sadly, I moved away from my very favorite espresso stand that served up different pumpkin flavored latte's in the fall. They used real pumpkin SAUCE, not pumpkin flavored syrups, and let me tell you, you just don't get any closer to heaven in a cup! I made the Pioneer Woman's Pumpkin Cake, though I left out the whiskey, and it is officially one of my new favorite fall recipes! I'm sure it would be really tasty with the whiskey to, and I'll probably try that soon, but the venue it was going to didn't really scream whiskey whipped cream to me.

This year in particular I'm really enjoying fall in my new house. I have been really interested to see what our property looks like in the fall and I have to find joy where ever I can in my loooong commute to and from work. The fall colors certainly have not disappointed me. They are rather spectacular on my 30 mile commute. Most of the trees around our house are evergreens, so nothing terribly interesting, but there is still enough color around the property to get me out there with my camera. I am also trying to squeeze as much yard work and garden reconfiguring in as I can before the weather turns and I'm stuck inside. I've been trying to pick small projects that I can finish up easily and quickly (and for free!) that actually make an impact. I've been doing pretty good so far, but I'll talk more about that in another post. I think.

Also, I've offered to host Thanksgiving dinner for my family again this year. I'm really excited to have everyone out to my new-ish house (how long is it really new? We've lived there for 6 months now, does it still qualify???). With the expectation of hosting turkey day though comes sooo many indoor projects that I want to finish before I have everyone over. We plan to paint the whole entire interior of the house sooner or later and because of that (mostly), I have not really decorated much at all yet. We have nothing hanging on the walls. The living room is bare and boring. The kitchen is an awful mauve color that just doesn't really go with the cupboards or floor. Or any of my kitchen stuff. I swear the people that built the house must have had a million and three things hanging on the walls. I think I have pulled out no less then 50 nails/screws. FROM EACH ROOM! Good lord, don't people realize that sometimes less is more?! So it is a huge project to get the walls ready to paint. I have prioritized my list of projects to get done before the fam comes out though. Painting my kitchen and my master bathroom needs to be done. Everything else isn't horrible, just not my choice of colors, but the kitchen and my bathroom just can't wait. I have 4 1/2 weeks to do that. I think it's reasonable. I did paint the main bathroom just after we moved in and it turned out really nice! I was very pleased with it.

While I'm anxious to get going on my painting and indoor projects, I really can't bring myself to go inside just yet. I want to soak up every last minute of sun and blue skies that I can before winter. Sometimes that means just running around with my camera, that I have been unusually inspired by lately (bordering on obsessive with the photo taking actually), and taking pictures of all the pretty fall colors. I'm sure I'll appreciate them when I'm stuck inside getting stir crazy in February.