Happy Halloween!

It feels like Halloween has passed already because Trick or Treat was almost a week ago, but anyway Happy Halloween to everyone!

I have been playing around with my new camera, I just LOVE it! The true test will be later today when Mason has his first basketball game. Last year with my old camera, I could not get a good picture in the gym. It must have been the lighting, but it was awful! So, I am hoping to be able to post some good basketball pictures this year. Here are some of the things I have taken shots of in hopes of learning how to use this wonderful new camera (because, you know, reading the manual is out of the question!):

Beautiful fall colors:


Really cool mushrooms!



Beautiful sunrise this morning:


And, my Floydy Boydy welcoming me back inside:

He's so cute!

Jason says that I find the weirdest things to take pictures of, but isn't everything worth taking a picture of? Especially nature.

Jason and I are doing some Christmas [and birthday] shopping tonight. Mason is spending the night at Grandma and Grandpa tonight! Yeah! We are also going to take in a movie! Double Yeah! How appropriate that it is Halloween and we want to go see the #1 scariest movie out! Paranormal Activity. I CAN NOT wait to see this movie. I have heard it's a 'Blair Witch' type movie, which is soooooo awesome! I saw a piece on the news this morning that this movie has moved into the #1 slot for grossing the most money ever. It only cost $11,000 to make. So that just proves that you don't need a ton of money to produce a great film, you just need imagination. I am so thrilled to see this tonight. We are going to the 10:00 showing, so lets just hope I can stay awake!!

Tricks And Treating

On Saturday night a group of us went to a haunted house. We had to beg, bribe and plead for Mason to go into the house. He was terrified, to put it mildly. We got there and he wanted to be in between Jason and I and he wanted me to wrap my arms around him really tight so that the creatures/monsters wouldn't get near him. So I did and his heart was beating so fast that I thought it was going to jump right out of his chest! I have to admit before we walked into the haunted house I was starting to get second thoughts! It was really creepy. We made it through and Mason did well, although there were a few times that he started to cry! He felt better when Jason talked to the actors because he knew then that they were just people! After the haunted house they took us on a haunted hay ride. It was such a beautiful night, I could have stayed on the hay ride for hours. Then they drop us off and we travel through the haunted woods. It was great! We had no idea what to expect and then all of the sudden a guy jumps out with a chainsaw and starts to follow us. Then there were fire explosions, people coming out of the corn field, screams, props that you didn't know were real people, it was just fantastic! Then we made our way out and got some snacks and listened to some great music from the live band. Mason then got a picture with Beetlejuice:



It was so much fun, I'd love to do it again next year.

Trick or Treat was today, almost a full week before Halloween, but what can you do? Here they have it during the day and although safety is the #1 concern, it is no fun walking around in the daytime to trick or treat. I always thought that was strange and took away from all the fun. But Mason got some candy, we didn't let him go over board and he only hit about 15-20 houses and that was it. He decided to be an 'Evil Leprechaun' this year. Did I ever have fun putting his costume together. He is such a good sport about costumes. I am trying to instill in him to use his imagination, so don't just go buy something off the rack at Walmart! Get creative. I don't know if it's working, but hey, I'll give it a shot anyway!! Here he is:




I really liked the way it turned out and he did get a lot of compliments/comments on it, so it was well worth the effort!

I've got a Lifetime movie to attend here in a few minutes, so have a great night, everyone!

Farewell Football

Sunday marked the last flag football game Mason will have. He will move up to tackle next year (yeah!) and it will be a whole new experience. We did end up losing our last game and there were plenty of questionable calls, but oh well, the kids had a great season.





There there was an after party at a pizza place and I swear the highlight of the place was the prize machines, the ones that no one in their right mind would go buy at a store, but for some reason when aliens are wrapped up in a cheap plastic ball, they are the coolest toy ever! So in addition to the tons of cheapy toys, Mason gets these crazy teeth, that I have to admit are REALLY funny!!





My friend, Cherie finally bought a couple of packs of the Wegman's crumpets and she loved them just as much as I do, so in our never-ending search on how to make things cheaper, better and easier, she found a recipe on how to make crumpets! I was soooooo thrilled that I could hardly contain myself!! I immediately printed out the recipe and went to the store. I bought all fresh ingredients because who knows how long that flour had been sitting in my cabinets, I wanted them to be just perfect! I even bought a griddle and a sifter (I don't ever remember using a sifter!). The directions call for 'egg rings', I know what these are and had no idea it would be so difficult to find them. It was and I didn't. I searched high and low (ok maybe 4 stores, but still) and came up empty. I even enlisted Jason to search for them while he was working. There is a big kitchen store 'down the mountain' so, next time I'm out that way I will pick them up, I'm sure they carry them there. So instead I used some aluminum foil and made 'rings' with it. Back to the recipe. I very seldom, if ever use yeast, my knowledge of this product mainly comes from the lady at Walmart that was buying the same product and I played a game of 20 questions with her. She seemed very helpful, however she didn't know I was making crumpets, not bread and I didn't want to bug her anymore. It called for 'compressed yeast' or if that wasn't available to use 'dry yeast'. I bought the regular yeast and begged it to work. Can anyone give me info on the types of yeast? I have to admit the final product tasted good (not as good as Wegman's) but they looked more like biscuits, not crumpets. I will not give up on this recipe, I really want it to work!



I'll keep trying.

A Record You Don't Want To Break

Well, we officially broke the record here in central Pa! We had the earliest snowfall since 1940! I'm not that pleased with that. Take a look:







October 15th. The snow fall continued through to this morning. The good news is that it is supposed to be up into the 50's and 60's next week (thank goodness!!). I also heard that it is supposed to be a mild winter (yeah!) and that most of the snow fall this year will be more towards the south, it's about time they get some snow down there!

Here are some funny pictures to brighten your day!







Have a good day!

There hasn't been too much going on here, but I thought I'd try to get a blog in. I'm not too sure how entertaining this is going to be, but....
Here are some of my favorite LOL cats from the past couple of weeks:






There there is this:



We were watching TV and heard about this burger that is sandwiched in between two Krispy Kreme donuts (can you say D.I.S.G.U.S.T.I.N.G)! Talk about a heart attack, yuck!

Mason's football season is wrapping up, he only has one game left (boo-hoo) and then moving right along into basketball.

I started decorating for Halloween, all 8 bins are down from the attic and sorted through, sometimes I wonder about myself and all this 'stuff' I feel like I 'need' to buy on clearance, but it is fun to open the bags and see what I got!! Here are some of the decorations so far:

This guy sings 'Super Freak' (and he dances!), he's been around for quite a few Halloween's now and we just had to change his batteries!



This one is one of my favorites, mainly because I scored this for dirt cheap! I got him two years ago at Micheal's (on clearance!) regular price, $69.99 I got it for $6.99! Really, though it is a nice decoration but NOT worth almost $70!



Here are the twin witches:



This, I love:



I saw in a catalog a few years back these REALLY cool labels that you put on old soda bottles, wine bottles, etc. and it instantly turns them into creepy Halloween liquids. I was all set on ordering them, but then I walked into the Dollar Tree and there they were for $1, can't beat that!! I filled them with water and food coloring, the one I put rice in the liquid and it made the pieces of rice look like maggots--AWESOME! I just used an old olive jar, marshmallow creme jar, peanut butter jar, salsa jar and an old prescription bottle for this. I just finished it off with some fake spiders and it makes a super cheap, super fun Halloween decoration!

I will post some more decorations as I get them up, by the I get them up, I just hope it's not November 1st!

{Full Weekend}

On Saturday night we had plans to go see Cirque Du Soleil at the BJC in State College. We were SO thrilled as we are huge fans of Cirque. We left our house a little too early, so we had time to browse around Barnes and Noble and a little party/Halloween store to kill some time. We finally got to our destination and we were getting so excited to see this show! We didn't go 'all out' like we did last time by getting floor seating, but believe me, our seats were not cheap, by any means. So we get in the door and attempt to find our seats. We go up the stairs and up the stairs and up yet more stairs. We were the LAST row of seats in the entire place. I mean the wall was to our back. I was SO disappointed to say the least. It was so cramped, so uncomfortable, so high up that if you don't have 20/20 vision, you can't see much. I figured there was no sense in complaining about it because what was done was done, I thought I'd enjoy as much as I could. So, the show started and I love to see the detail of the costumes, the color, the sequins, the make-up, etc. but we could hardly make out what (or who) was on the stage let alone what color their shoes were. Such a bummer. At intermission, we waited for everyone in our row (we had end seats) to come back before we sat down. No one came. Half of our section didn't come back! I think they all decided to try to get better seats because not only was half of the 'good (or at least waaaay better) seats' empty, no one was checking seats, so they figured, "why not?". I should have followed suit. Oh well. The show was ok, but I'm assuming that a combination of bad seats and an altered show (because it was in an arena, not a tent) made it a not very exciting night. :(

Mason got some pretty cool pictures on our way there (these are in negative), perhaps he's got photography in his future:




Then Sunday rolls around and we decided to go to the Pittsburgh Renaissance Festival. Jason had gone to one of these when he was a kid and he still talks about it to this day. So, I thought we'd give it a try. To sum it up in one word: Odd. It was different and I am glad we went, but WOW, some of these people are strange!! I mean the ones who are not the actors but still come dressed from head to toe in medieval clothing! I felt like it was a midnight showing of Harry Potter with all the people in costumes! Overall though the experience was pretty neat. An actor was trying to get Jason to drink beer at 11am, a woman who hit us up for tips was showing us that she trained a 'bone' to do tricks, adding 'th' to everything seems to make the word sound old, selling single roses for $4 and making the man feel guilty for not buying one (by the way, I told Jason NOT to buy me one even before they hit him up for one), extremely dangerous games (ninja star and ax throwing, both of which my guys participated in) and really meaty food rounded out the day. We were looking at the program to find some shows to catch and this one looked funny, however it had a 'parents beware' sign meaning it was not appropriate for kids, so we moved on to the one that stated, "Good clean fun for the whole family". OMGosh, we had to leave, I almost had to put my hands over Mason's ears, I'd hate to see what the one that is not appropriate for kids was like. Wow. Here are some more highlights from the day:




Here is the creepy King and Queen, it so reminds me of the Burger king commercials!







Mason wanted to do the archery, but it was only under the condition that he didn't hit the 'deer', he had to aim for the straw. I didn't need to worry about that anyway because his aim was SO bad!! He thought it was much more fun to aim at the trees and trying to get it over the back drop! Jason, on the other hand shot the faux deer right in the heart, he will pay dearly.



Let's GO STEELERS, we NEED a win!!