Pumpkins (2012 Edition)

Posted on by Jordan

It’s been a surprisingly busy weekend here!

Friday night, Heather and I went with some friends to a special worship event put on by a church in the area. The theme was vaguely bluegrass, but it appears that just giving an electric guitar player a banjo doesn’t alter the style of the music as much as one might have expected. That being said, it was a fun evening, and they had a great worship team.

Saturday morning, Heather headed down to the capital to participate in the annual breast cancer awareness walk. She had a great time, and was happy to discover that her friends from the office were more than happy to set a pace that accommodates someone 32 weeks pregnant.

At the same time, I headed out to the building our church is slowly working to clean up for a new location. The good news with that project is that the demolition is nearly done, and the city has nearly figured out all the kinks in the permit issuance process. I still managed to get completely covered in cobwebs and dust in no time! It appears that we are going to clean by simply hauling dust out one shirt load at a time 🙂

Heather and I then met up to head to the Habitat “restore” to see about getting some flooring to use in building a photography studio style backdrop she had seen online. We found something that might work, along with some other odds and ends Heather thought might be useful.

When we got home, we proceeded to spend the next few hours cleaning up (this line may make a new low in mundane things I typed into the blog… ah well)

Some friends came over that night to carve pumpkins, and brought their newly born daughter!

Heather was happy to take breaks from carving to entertain her, and by the time the night was done I had managed to rock her to sleep in my arms for a while (the baby, not Heather)

As a small tangent we discovered that, for larger cuts, a “keyhole saw” is wildly superior to a knife! I also had rigged a handle onto a jigsaw blade, and we found it surprisingly easy to maneuver around the tight corners of our designs. The end results were something everyone was proud of, and I think that’s all we can ask for 🙂

Sunday nearly kept pace with how our weekend stared. After church, Heather had back-to-back photo sessions for friends, and then spent the evening working on her “Initials project” (more on that in an upcoming post!) I wasn’t quite as busy, but built stands for the backdrop we shopped for on Saturday, and finished prepping a bench thing we have such that it can be recovered.

I keep saying that the impending approach of the baby is going to slow our weekend pace down… so far it hasn’t, but there is still time I suppose 🙂

 

-Jordan

Somehow Fall Snuck Up On Us

Posted on by Jordan

It has been another full weekend, for Heather and I.

I started off camping with the scouts, on a trip that included a bike ride

As you can see we brought a lot of bikes along.

The ride was along the trails north of Des Moines. The same trails that lead up to the bridge we rode over back at the beginning of summer. The only thing was, we rode past red trees, and through piles of leaves blowing along the trail. We were lucky in that the weather was great! It was cold over night, but by the time we had bikes going on the trail it was a wonderful fall day.

I suppose talking about a beautiful ride, and the wonderful colors would be more interesting with a picture or two. The problem is all the bikes you saw in that picture were being operated by scouts… not to say they were getting into trouble, but I wanted to keep an eye on things.

That and the fact that all I had was my phone. It’s a workable camera, but phones aren’t suppose to go on camp outs. Adults get to bend those rules, but the boys complain to no end about their oppression when they see you get your phone out and they realize they can’t.

I left camp early because I was doing sound at church. It was probably a good thing I came home when I did though, because the smoke alarm at the top of our fancy vaulted ceiling had decided it had problems and started beeping earlier that day. Heather was about ready to loose it by the time I got there. It did provide an opportunity to use the big step ladder we bought shortly after taking possession of our new place… although I can think of scenarios were we would have used the ladder for some great purpose that don’t also involve Heather having dangerously high blood pressure… Maybe next time it will just be burned out light bulb.

Sunday we had a few friends over to carve pumpkins!

… yeah pumpkins… I didn’t really think it was time for those ether, but apparently it is.

My artistic vision was somewhat hampered by my absolute lack of manual dexterity or and artistic skill, so imagine the one I am holding looks sleepy. When you consider that the face on mine tilts down and sort of leans… and then add a little imagination it’s a pretty good pumpkin I think.

Oh, on a somewhat related note, I discovered that if you make pumpkin bread, but leave out the pumpkin, the resulting product will be a rather dry spice-bread. Stop by the break room at work tomorrow you might get to try some, its not bad… but it wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

-Jordan

Pumpkins!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I invited some friends who just got married this summer for supper and pumpkin carving last night.

 

Its really fun to hang out with recently married couples, they can commiserate on wedding planning hassles, and how long the engagement feels. Not that Heather and I would ever complain about any of those things 🙂

The pumpkin carving was really fun! Heather picked up 2 little carving kits for the pumpkins. Those were well worth the $2 or whatever they were… the little scraping spoons were short-handled with a good kind of tip for getting the slimy stuff out of the inside of the pumpkin. The gig-saw blade things they included were pretty handy too, let us do some fairly delicate things on the pumpkins without too much hassle.

I was pretty happy with mine, and I think everyone really had fun carving the pumpkins! 

**Heather: Edit added the pictures!

-Jordan