a fall fairy house

The grandbaby's first loose tooth has been something of a preoccupation with her. Add to that her recent admiration of fairies, most especially Tinkerbell and the tooth fairy, and you have precisely the reason that I spent time last weekend working on a fairy house.
The tooth fairy will be coming soon. My grandbaby reasons that the tooth fairy visit might be at my house if that is where that little lower cuspid, now barely dangling, ultimately comes loose. The grandbaby further reasons that the tooth fairy  will probably need a place to rest after she drops off picks up the tooth and exchanges it for whatever the going rate is for (grand)baby teeth these days.
Thus, it became necessary to construct a fairy house. We gathered up things we found in and around the house and yard. A plastic container,  pine cones, leaves, berries, ribbon were used on the outside. Twigs and other bits of wood became furniture and fixtures inside.
We were both please with the results, as was the Grandbaby's sleepover company who also helped. That tooth is still hanging on, but when it comes loose, we have the fairy rest station ready.

Postscript: I did a search for the going rate for baby teeth  and found the an interesting article on Huffington Post. Here's the link:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/30/tooth-fairy-inflation_n_3840954.html

girls of fall

 

Sunday was a particularly beautiful fall day.  We walked to and from church. We had pot roast before everyone begin to disperse to start the new week and I snapped some pictures of my oldest daughter and my grandbaby on Sunday and included the pumpkins we decorated and scarecrow we put up with them.
 

pumpkin carving

 

When I think of carving pumpkins I think of using an old paring knife to cut triangles for eyes and a nose and jagged teeth. The were no patterns or templates that I recall. It was a messy project deemed well worth the trouble by my sisters and me because of the fun we had doing it. Even digging the messy "guts" of the pumpkin out of the shell we found fun.
At time house last Friday night, things were a bit more complicated and technical. First there were searches on the computer and a look-see at "pin boards." A pumpkin carving kit was available but was ultimately forsaken by the Hub's drill.  The good news is they moved on out to the patio before they began drill/carving their pumpkins. By then they had abandoned both old school methods and the newer ones. They had drawn and redraw patterns and shapes. 
The final products are fantastic. The one with round holes resembles a lovely luminaire. The other has two letters "X" for eyes and a appears to either have on braces.
Now comes the bad news: there were chips and chunks of pumpkin all over the place. The clean up took a while. Worse news still: there are no surviving seeds to roast.
Next fall, I plan to advocate early for the old school manner of making carving pumpkins to make jack o'lanterns.

hold your horses

 

My little grand girl is growing up too fast for me.
I have enjoyed (almost) every minute I've ever spent with her. I am thankful that there have been so many of them.
I recently heard someone say that when we are young time crawls. As we get older, it walks and then runs. As we grow older still, it flies. That is where I am.
Like my grandbaby, time goes too fast for me these days. She crawled and walked all too soon. She has always run fast and it seems to me she runs faster all the time.
Never am I more aware of how fast she and time are growing than when I compare pictures of her at various times and in various seasons to that of other times and seasons. The pictures above make the point. That's her granddad walking beside her on a pony at our local Sorghum Day festival. The pictures were taken almost exactly five years apart.
The chubby cheeked little baby in the top row is now the lanky little first grader in the bottom three.
And it has happened too fast.

lip gloss

 

There is really not a lot of write about here. The grandbaby loves lip gloss. She carries several tubes of it around with her. She applies is often. It makes her happy. It makes me happy to see her happy. The end.

barking water brew

 

We believe our friends the Tuckers made the best brisket sandwiches and lemonade in the whole wide world.  Every fall on Sorghum Day, their booth against the Seminole Nation Museum is one of our first stops.
This year, the mint in the lemonade was an especially big hit with the Grandbaby. The Barking Waters are just north and a little east of the festival site where the lemonade that carries their name is sold.
This year we missed riding the train down to the Barking Waters, munching on sorghum coated popcorn. What we did not miss were those sandwiches and that lemonade. We had our fill of those and all our smiles were a lot  like the one on the left.

scenes from sorghum day

 

This being my third post about the Sorghum Festival in as many days, you may pick up on the fact that it is something my family and I like.  My eldest child says it is her third favorite day of the year: right behind her birthday and Christmas.
It is one of my favorite days, too. Here's why:
the weather is usually perfect
it is like a combination family/class reunion/pilgrimage (people with even loose ties to the community make the annual jaunt to attend the event)
the glee and delight exhibited when the aforementioned folk run into each other
the craft booths and craft demonstrations
the various food booths (especially the roasted corn)
the sorghum mules, harnessed to the sorghum making apparatus
the live music


 

decked out for fall

 

I make myself wait until the first of October to put fall decorations out.  Up until then I use apples and back-to-school Septemberish  accents on shelves and coffee tables. I add some ornamental grasses and mums along but as soon as it is October, though, I am all about fall.
If there is anything prettier than pumpkins and gourds, leaves and hedge apples with cattails and  persimmons and cabbage, kale and pansies, I don't know what it is.
 

Chloe

Once again, it was the baby daughter who caused a dog to come live at our house. She was in high school and had gone to the mall to Christmas shop with a friend. They were selling puppies in the parking lot. Guess what we she got her Daddy for Christmas that year?!
She tied a ribbon around the puppy's neck and came carrying up the driveway. I am not sure who was prouder, she or her Dad.
He loves to duck hunt. She was determine that the puppy was going to be a duck dog. As far as I can recall, the only duck that dog every had in its mouth was a toy one a friend of mine bought her to play with.  She was a pet, through and through; like our dogs always tend to be.
She grew up to be sweet natured and beautiful.
She was always playful.  With everyone, but most especially her master and the one who gave her to him. They taught her to retrieve. She loved to swim and we took her to the lake often. But she never became the duck dog they intended. Tragedy struck first.

If you read my post about the outside dog named Disney, the real Dalmatian, then you know that after she was run over I said I hoped I never went through something like that again.
Well we did. With Chloe. And it was just as awful.
We were having a family dinner. Everyone came in through the back gate. The last to arrive were my sister and brother-in-law. He came through first and left the gate ajar thinking she was right behind him. Before she entered, she remembered something she needed to bring in from her car and turned back to get it. Chloe, seeing a chance to run amuck bolted out the gate before anyone could stop her.
She ran immediately across the street. The Hub and son ran after her. Sonny was out front, being the younger and faster of the two. The Hub was calling to her and before Sonny could yell "No, Dad, don't call her, there's a car coming" she turned to run back across and to her master. The timing could not have been worse. Both the Hub and Sonny say they still have bad dreams about what happened next.
They loaded her up and took her to our vet who tried to save her but without success. They brought her back home and we buried her behind the shed during the time we intended to be celebrating.
We all felt terrible but no one more than my sister and brother-in-law.
Some folks still believe she'd have made a fabulous gun dog.  The blonde lab who replaced her is gun shy. She came to us shy and nothing we've done has completely cured that. She, like my original pet, Shorty, is scared even of thunder.
We still miss our sweet Chloe, as we miss Disney. I, as much as anyone else.
I guess that makes it hard for anyone to believe I am not a dog lover, as I have so often declared.

bangs or no bang; that is the question

 

I have worn bangs most of my life. As the picture on the left shows, from the time I was very young;  I've had them. There have been times I've tried something different. Most recently, I started growing them out after I decided I was too old for them. The selfie on the right illustrates that point.
Tomorrow I have a hair appointment. Between now and then I must decide whether I continue on without bangs or go back to them.
The truth is, it feels rather odd not to have them. While it is nice not to have my sister calling me "Buster Brown" I still miss the bangs.
They grow too fast. I have been known to cut them myself with my manicure scissors. It makes the people at my office really nervous when I do that. But as you can tell from the younger of the two pictures above, I am not afraid of crooked bangs. I expect I cut them myself just before the baby picture was taken. Surely no family member or beautician did that to me.
I know that this is not all that important a decision in the grand scheme of things.
The government is officially shut down.
There is so much confusion and certainty in our country and in the world of late that I am almost ashamed to admit that I really am struggling to decide on what to do with my hair.
At least that decision is one I can make myself and bear the ultimate responsibility for.
Too bad the same is not true of some of the rest of what is going on these days.