Hurricane Sandy aftermath

Well, we survived the hurricane pretty well (WAY better than some people in NY and NJ did).  Surprisingly we kept our power and only lost our cable and internet overnight.  I was following our town reporter on Twitter and boy, was she good about posting updates to the minute so I knew exactly when the bottom of my street flooded to impassable and when a tree at the top of my street blew over (almost into a house!) and when and where the rest of the trees/wires/poles in my neighborhood came down.  I had no work for two days as the public schools were closed so that the town could clean up and restore power.

We didn't go outside during the storm, but I did take a picture out the window.  Look at how much the little tree in the distance is bending in the wind!

After the storm was over, we took a walk around the neighborhood to see the damage, and there was quite a bit.

lots of leaves in the backyard

leaves stuck to the side of the house from the wind

pretty much the extent of the damage in our yard

giant tree almost in a kitchen window at the top of our street

After walking our neighborhood we took a walk down to the pond to see how it fared.  It was such a gorgeous day out that you would never tell a hurricane came through just the day before (except for the monster trees down)!!

gorgeous

lots of water came through here

I jumped in for scale

Although we're lucky to have survived as well as we did there are lots of people who didn't and we're thinking about them and hope things get sorted out as quickly as can be!

Frankenstorm

We are quickly approaching the "storm of the century" which is a hurricane, arctic storm, and some other storm all converging over our heads for multiple hours at a time.  Everyone who can be is staying home today and the wind and the rain are picking up quickly.  Power outages are predicted for long periods of time.  This is almost exactly one year after Halloween was postponed for major storm related power outages last year.  Supposedly the storm will be at its worst this afternoon and evening so we are waiting to see what we get.  This is the first big storm since we've been in the house so we have our eye on some trees in the backyard and one that's right over the power lines.  Since most trees still have lots of leaves on them they can cause a lot more damage when they fall.

The wind really picked up this morning as you can see from these pictures that I took of the yard.

This is the yard yesterday when we were putting all loose things away:

 

And this is the yard this morning at 9:30 AM

I can't wait to see what it will look like by tomorrow!!

Here's the deck this morning (and also my PhotoFriday entry for "changing seasons"):

Good luck to all going through Hurricane Sandy!

pumpkin carving update

Well, we carved our pumpkins on Tuesday so I thought I'd give a little update to how they are doing.  I didn't check on them on Wednesday, but when I opened the front door on Thursday to let the warm sun in, I spotted this guy...

Uh oh...   I watched him for a bit and he was just eating some weeds in the yard so I didn't think about it, but when I went to light the candles in the pumpkins, this is what my howling wolf looked like:

THE WHOLE WOLF WAS GONE!!  Now it's just a full moon....

We thought about bringing Jared's pumpkin inside but didn't want it to get too warm and mold so this is what it looked like on Friday:

Very disappointing :(  I was hoping that they would last at least until Halloween but I guess our neighborhood critters had other ideas.  We had thought about spraying them with a water/bleach mixture but after reading online the results were inconclusive so we decided to wing it.  Maybe if we had sprayed them the animals wouldn't have liked the taste and left them alone.  Guess we'll have to try again next year!

pumpkin carving

Halloween is almost here so we knew we had to get busy carving some pumpkins!  Since we've been in various apartments over the last few years, I haven't had the opportunity to carve a pumpkin in a while so I was excited to do it this year.  Jared got into the swing of things too and we picked a couple up while we were at BJ's the other day.

The first thing we did was peruse the internet and find some carving patterns that we liked.  It just worked out that we both picked ones with wolves in them!  Jared picked one that was advanced and I picked one that was a little easier.  Then, we spread out newspaper, put a Halloween mix on Pandora, and got to work.

I always find the scooping-out-the-insides part the grossest...

While we scraped out the goopy stuff, we separated some of the seeds so we could roast them.  I was really surprised at how easy it was and it made the house smell sooo good!  I just rinsed them off, spread them on a baking sheet, sprayed them with vegetable oil, and sprinkled a little sea salt on them.  Then I baked them at 325 degrees for 25 minutes and they were delicious! Very crispy and salty and the perfect snack while we worked on our carvings.

But back to the pumpkins... Jared had brought home one of those little carving sets (but only had the scoop and the little knife) so we took turns using it.  We put the patterns on the pumpkins and poked holes with a pin all around the outline so we would know where to cut.  We got so into the project that I forgot to take pictures!

Here are the results, and they are pretty impressive if I do say so myself!

my pumpkin

Jared's pumpkin

spooky stoop decorations!

Bring on the trick-or-treaters, we are ready!!

Photo Friday 10/19

Took a walk to the pond by my house.  Fall is definitely in full swing!!

This week's challenge: Vibrant

Photo Friday

I'm pretty much in love with taking pictures with my iphone and editing them to see just what my little 3-generations-ago smartphone can do.  I came across this website with a weekly photo challenge every Friday so I'll be uploading pictures (iphone and digital camera based) here to submit them.  Let the photography begin!

This week's challenge:
In Motion

patching our ceiling

When we moved into our house the previous owners had installed a cornice board above the giant picture window in the living room.  It was obviously homemade and when it was installed, they used GIANT nails.  Like, ginormous.  And so many of them.  That thing wasn't going anywhere!  Unfortunately, I didn't take a great picture of it, but this one should give you an idea...

 giant cornice board AND ugly wallpaper! yikes!

We didn't really love it and it was a pain in the butt to get curtains in and out of it, so Jared ripped it down with great relish and chopped it up.  The bad news was that it left some huge holes where the huge nails had gone into the ceiling.  It is a textured ceiling so we weren't quite sure how we were going to patch all those holes without it looking too obvious. 

Well, I gave it a go the other day and I think it came out pretty well.  Here's what it looked like before:

For the bigger holes I used some mesh joint tape just to cover the holes before I started covering everything with joint compound.  Most of the smaller holes just took one layer of joint compound.

Once I had some nice pink patches, I found a little fireplace broom that had been left behind by the previous owners and was made out of straw.  I scraped this along the wet joint compound in the direction of the texture on the ceiling.

And surprise!  It actually worked really well!!  The straw spread the joint compound in exactly the same way the ceiling was already textured and I'm hoping that once we get some fresh paint on there you won't even be able to tell I patched a gazillion holes!!  Score one for random objects inherited with the house!

insulation!

As I mentioned in my last post, we recently had our whole house insulated.  We bought the house in mid-December and moved in at the end of January.  Even with such a mild winter, we were still going through oil like crazy.  We bought thermal curtains for the windows and put blankets around the doors to keep out the draft but it was still so chilly!  So this spring we had an energy audit done and guess what?  No good insulation in the walls!!  Apparently what had been there was SO old that it basically looked like tissue paper at this point.  So with the awesome credit from Mass Save we tackled the job of insulating the house.  Although they were booked up for 3 months, the process couldn't have been easier.  One or two inspections, and then 3 days of dirty, fluff covered guys filling the walls.  Immediately we noticed a difference.  The house was so silent!  I definitely think that it will help this coming winter and we are very glad we did it.

Now for the bad news... Since our siding on the house is so old the guys didn't think they could take it off to blow in the insulation and replace it without destroying it.  So their recommendation was to insulate from the inside of the house.  In. between. every. stud.  Every one!!  So one day when I got home, the house looked like this:

All our hard work of refinishing those walls! Hanging that trim! Painting everything!!  The tragedy!!!  Here are a few more examples:

 (obviously a room we haven't tackled yet)

SO MANY HOLES!!!

And the furniture!  That cellulose insulation gets everywhere so for a while our house looked like this:

I will say, however, that the company we used was VERY good about cleanup afterward.  Each day they vacuumed up the extra fluff.  Our carpeted stairs looked better than when they arrived!!

There is certainly a lot of work ahead of us but I am proud to say that after this weekend we have at least restored the dining room and the tv room to their previous status.  Whew!!

Here's proof!

Now that we've gotten those rooms re-finished we can move on to other rooms! Oh the fun... :)

fall walking

Whew! What a busy weekend! It was really nice to have a 3 day weekend - thank you Columbus, even if your methods were a little questionable!  I think this weekend was the perfect amount of working time and relaxing time.  We restored our house to it's pre-insulation status finally.  I'll write more in the next post, but suffice it to say we were busy patching, painting, and moving furniture but we can finally live in those rooms again!  So much space!

I also went to spectate Jared's volleyball game.  They put on an event called Serve for the Cure that raised money for the breast cancer center at the local hospital.  He coached the heck out of that game.  The girls lost but only by a teenie margin.  They played a great game!

Then, Monday, we were able to get out on a nice walk around the pond by our house.  The leaves are just starting to turn bright colors so we had a nice little "leaf peeping" outing.  It was a little chilly but overall a pretty nice day for a walk.  Here are some of my favorite pictures!

bundled up and enjoying the day!

Jared pointed out this cool blue heron waiting for fish!

a splash of color

walking in the woods...

I think we both felt that we accomplished a lot this weekend but were also able to take some time to relax and enjoy ourselves.  If only every weekend could be three days!!

Great Escape

This weekend I had the opportunity to join in the Great Escape which is a weekend getaway for adult Girl Scouts.  I haven't done anything with girl scouts since I graduated from high school but I have a friend whose mom is big in organizing the trip every year and my friend was on the kitchen staff last year.  I was invited to join the kitchen staff this year and thought it might be a fun opportunity.  So Friday afternoon we headed up to Camp Wabasso in New Hampshire.  This is the girl scout camp where I went for two summers in middle school so I was curious to see if it had changed at all.

Once we got there we dove straight into food prep for the weekend.  The other kitchen girls were super nice and welcoming and put me straight to work.  Job number one was chopping 12 onions.  I was a mess by the end.  Onions do NOT like my eyes!!  We stayed in the kitchen until almost midnight but were able to prep almost everything for the next day.  We headed off to our tent in the rain and tried to get as much sleep as we could on a cold night.

The next morning saw a 6:00 AM wake up call and we were off into full breakfast mode.  I think I mixed about 8 pitchers of pancake batter and there were trays upon trays of bacon to be cooked as well as giant pots of oatmeal to stir.  Breakfast seemed to fly by and soon we were washing dishes and prepping for lunch.  Two different soups as well as a salad bar and baked potato bar seemed to come right together and it was on to decorating cupcakes for the big 30th birthday party later that evening.  8 different kind of cupcakes and decorations had us busy as well as three different cannoli fillings!  I focused on cupcake decorating while the others put together the lasagnas for dinner.

lots of bacon

lots of bacon drippings!!

We decorated the cupcakes with many different girl scout themes - from campfires, to music notes, daisies, Samoas, Thin Mints, and of course, gold and silver.  They looked SO good and people took lots of pictures before diving in.  By this point I was realizing how exhausting cooking for 80-100 people was!  We were able to escape for half an hour to take a walk to the lake but other than that we were in the kitchen all day!  My feet were not happy!

the beginnings of a cupcake campfire

hand piped daisy decorations

lots of antipasto skewers

meatball, anyone?

gold cupcakes

silver cupcakes

Samoa and daisy cupcakes

music notes

How cool are those campfire cupcakes??

mmm... cannolis...

I wish I had a good picture of the final display because it was amazing, but it wouldn't all fit into my little iphone camera screen.  Suffice it to say, it was awesome!!

Breakfast was pretty easy to prep for so we hit the tents a little earlier that night and slept straight through the night, waking up to an owl hooting right over our heads the next morning.  Breakfast was lots and lots of french toast, sausages, and potatoes.  I think everyone's favorite part was making stuffed french toast with the leftover cannoli filling from the night before.  Delish!  Some people even put it in their oatmeal!!  After washing lots of dishes and cleaning up the kitchen we were ready to head for home.

 French toast stuffed with cannoli filling.  Heaven...

I had such a fun time on this trip even though I barely saw anything but the inside of the kitchen.  It was neat to see the things that I remembered from camp such as flag ceremonies and sing a longs as well as people doing crafts, hiking, and archery.  It rained almost the whole weekend but this group of women didn't care.  They were there to relax and have fun, even if it meant knitting in the dining hall rather than relaxing outside.  I came home totally exhausted but felt great after lots of compliments on our meals.  It was fun to be a girl scout again!

 scenes from our walk

 got my toes in the water, even if it was cold and rainy!