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!

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!

weekend recap

We had a pretty busy fall weekend this weekend.  Jared was signed up to do the Warrior Dash in Connecticut with his mom, sister, and brother-in-law.  They were running a 4:00 heat which was pretty different since he usually does earlier ones but it meant that we didn't have to leave first thing in the morning.  The day ended up being beautiful and everyone did a really great job (and got very muddy).

Then, on Sunday, we headed down to Quincy for brunch with my family for my dad's birthday. We ate LOTS of good food and he really liked the fresh apple pie I made.  We went apple picking last weekend and had an excess of apples so what better birthday present!  The only downside is that it made the house smell delicious and then I had to give it away.

yummmm

After brunch we headed to our "home away from home" - Home Depot for some more paint samples for the living room and some mums to spruce up our rapidly deteriorating front steps.  I swear, as soon as we get one thing finished on this house another 3 things crop up...

don't mind the bricks, who needs them anyway?

I am enjoying fall so far.  It's been a nice transition this year with cool mornings and warmer days.  The leaves are starting to turn bright colors which always makes for scenic drives.  I am curious to see how much raking we will have to do this year.  I can't believe we are not that far away from the 1 year mark of owning our home.  Most everything is still packed away and we have all the furniture covered in plastic from the insulation so it still looks like a ghost town.  Slowly but surely...