Pics of halloween past

I was snooping through an old box of pictures recently and ran across this one of the girls from halloween. I'm thinking it must have been 2002. My little cutie patooties!

Mimi goes to college

Last week, mother and I hauled our happy heinies up to the Carolinas to visit the girls at college. We started out with the grad student at Wake Forest in North Carolina. 

Y'all knew I couldn't go to the historic south and not swing through an old cemetery if the opportunity presented itself. And of course it did in Old Salem, the Moravian settlement from the late 1700s.

We stayed in a really nice Airbnb in Clemson when we headed into South Carolina to see the freshman. It was all fine and dandy and fun until mother and the younger daughter picked up a nasty old stomach bug on our last day. Then we were just ready to get home!

One more thing... I got to see my granddoggie, Dewey. He's a cutie, but I can definitely tell he's half chihuahua. All 2.5 lbs of him.

Watchdogs extraordinaire

Our cairn terriers Ollie and Pepper are always on patrol. Sometimes to great effect, spying our Fed Ex man at the front gate, our pool guy doing his weekly service, or the gardener working in the yard. Bark, bark, bark! The cacophony is usually followed by lots of window peering and dashes to the door, as you see in the video below. 

And yet at night when the Ring camera sound goes off - and it's triggered multiple times every night - the dogs sleep through it or just ignore. The local raccoon, opossum and armadillo population inevitably traipses through the hedges right outside the master bedroom windows overnight where the dogs snooze with us, followed by the Ring noise. They typically don't move a muscle. They've investigated a few times, but I think now it has become just a blasé, oh there's the nightly critter tip-toeing through the boxwoods, no need for alarm. No need to disturb mom and dad. I guess if we want a real guard dog to set up a ruckus, we need to invest in a twitchy rescue junkyard dog.

Fall luncheon 2019

Oh sure, it's my birthday week, but I volunteered to host our quarterly luncheon for the ladies on my street tomorrow. This is my third year to host and I really enjoy it. The hostess provides the main, in my case smoked ham and roasted turkey. I've attended a few where the hostess has whipped up casseroles. King Ranch Chicken might be a future casserole possibility for me - so yummy! The rest of the ladies on the street bring sides and desserts. We usually have anywhere from 18-22 in attendance, ranging in age from 80s down to 40s. It's a really sweet group. 

I set it all up today, including what has become my signature hostess gift of decorated cookies for the season at each place setting. My new cookie lady did a great job with them. 

Every year I try a new seating arrangement and I think this may be my favorite thus far. We'll see how the traffic and conversation flows at the gathering. My "big" dining table seats ten comfortably. So I add folding tables to seat four more at each end of it. Then I set up my banquette for another trio. 

I'm a big fan of almond flavoring and was happy to learn that's what my new cookie lady Gwen uses in all of her edible creations. Best part - she lives less than two miles from me in the same neighborhood. It just doesn't get more convenient than that.

I usually come up with a trivia or guessing game, sometimes both. This year I just opted for a simple guess the number of fun-sized candies in the jar. 

A bouncing baby boy dog

The grad student daughter has talked about getting a dog on and off for a few years now. Or rather pecked me like a chicken about why she needs a dog. How she wants a pet to keep her company. Sends me pics of dogs she finds on pet sites. And so she recently took the plunge, unbeknownst to us, and got a chorkie.

Dewey is about 9-10 wks old now and weighs almost a pound. That's right, he's rat-sized. But she seems really attached to him already and so I became a reluctant granddogmother. At this stage in the game, I'm not ready to be a granny and so I guess the bottom line is I'm glad she opted for a dog instead of a baby. It will be interesting to see what our two terrier doggos think of him when she finishes up this second masters in December, moving her and Dewey in with us for several months while she preps/takes her final CPA exam and prepares to move to Chicago for her auditing job at a Big Four accounting firm. I'll keep you posted at the pandemonium that will undoubtedly ensue.

It's fall, y'all!

Next week I'm hosting a fall luncheon for the ladies on my street. I've hosted luncheons the past three years and it looks like this will be the first one where it doesn't rain. As a matter of fact, a little cool front is slated to push through our area a couple days before. So instead of feeling like the gates of hell, it might actually be tolerable outside so that anyone who wants to dine al fresco on my patio furniture could do so without sweating buckets.

My amazing cookie lady Mandi has taken a full-time job and is no longer available much of the time. So I was afraid I'd have to try my hand at baking and decorating some sugar cookies this year to have at every place setting for the luncheon. This has become my thing. Thankfully, I was saved from the work and possible embarrassment when I found a neighbor on the Next Door app who highly recommended a cookie artist less than two miles from my house. So I'm looking forward to picking up a couple dozen decorated pumpkins from her next Wednesday and see what the luncheon ladies think of her efforts.

Speaking of pumpkins, I'm loving all of the pumpkin varieties I'm seeing in our local grocery store. Since I decorate with the creams, blues and greens, it's right up my alley.

But I've gotta say that the bin full of these pumpkins wigged me out a bit. The contrast of orange and green is interesting. And yet leprosy pumpkins? I'm just not sure about that.