A Year Older

Not a Sound

Boston

Last weekend the Buchheits came over and we celebrated Jolene's birthday. We sat around the fire and ate cake while the kids went nuts jumping into the leaf pile.

Then on Tuesday morning I flew out to Boston. Leaving the CR airport:

The hotel where I stayed was in the suburbs which meant I ended up doing a lot of driving. Over the past few days I've spent roughly 5 hours driving around Boston because no one else in my group wanted to drive. The map looks like someone took a handful of cooked spaghetti and threw it in a heap... the streets are a tangled mess and there is no grid at all. Even the GPS in my van struggled to keep up! But it is a scenic area and the fall colors are at their peak right now, so I guess there's an upside.

Flying back to CR:

There's 380! I feel like a significant part of my life has been spent driving that boring stretch of road. At least I can crank the tunes and make the most of it.

Halloween

Halloween! Some pumpkin-carving fun:

Trick or Treat

Roxi did not disappoint...

Time to burn some pumpkins!

A roll of TP in each, soaked in lighter fluid and dried. They didn't flare up right away when lighting them, they actually took a minute or so to burn like this, but when they got going, LOOK OUT!

Oh Deer

As I drove down Gilbert Street to my office this morning a buck came running from my office building and ran right in front of my car. He had jumped through the window into the office – with people in there – and made a mess. I took some pictures of the aftermath.

Here is where the deer entered. Look closely at that window. Do you see anything? Think "Halloween":

Now do you see it? C'mon, it's clearly the grim reaper holding a scythe!

And this is the mess he made when he came back out. He ran into the brick wall and then tried to break through the glass door. Lots of blood:

Broken glass on the sidewalk:

The blood looked so fake. It looked like bright red paint and it was very thick:

He hit the door here and left saliva and blood across the glass:

We're not sure what happened with the deer. We last saw him running across the street and around a building, so maybe his rampage continued!

Octobah

Oh yeah, I have a blog! It's funny when I neglect something like this long enough I sorta half expect it to not be there anymore when I finally come back to it. But here it is, right where I left it.

I'm not even going to try to catch up on stuff, just going to post things from the past week. Last night Cynthia finished the girls' Halloween costumes:

Emily is a black cat and Rose is a steampunk girl. She even made that little hat on top and the pendant with the brass gears and watch parts.

When we went to Indy last weekend the fall colors were at their peak and I took some photos. I also took a snapshot of the tree in front of their house:

Roxi is in the spirit, too. It was a dark and stormy night...

Cynthia gave us a tour of where she works. It was really cool to finally see it and get a better picture of what she's talking about when she tells stories about her job and the people she works with.

We've got our pumpkins picked out and we're gonna carve 'em up soon. This year we'll light all four of them with the lighter fluid/tp method! The rest of you can keep your wussy tea lights.

Fire Pit

A few weeks ago we built a new fire pit in the backyard. We used 32 landscaping stones and 1 tire rim from an 18-wheeler and – voila! There it is: