Happy Thanksgiving !

I hope you all are having a nice day with that traditional Thanksgiving food that you look forward to and being with family.  

My family always has turkey, baked dressing (not stuffed in the turkey), sweet potato casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry salad, homemade butterhorn rolls and pecan and pumpkin pie.  Every year we say "yikes, this is all carbs!" and try to think of something green to have with it at least or usually just say "oh well, it's only one day a year". 

This year I got a couple of new things to decorate our table and really like how it looks.  I love table runners and have had this on the table all fall.  Some bittersweet around the candles would be nice too.  I spotted some bittersweet along the trail but it's mostly up high in the trees.

an unusual pumpkin

I really like this Jack-O-Lantern I have up in Oct.

Camry asked me why this "clown" was in her little chair!  She didn't know about scarecrows yet.

Cemetery Work

Bill is on the Board of the cemetery so he gets to do some unusual jobs related to that.

On this day this summer, he took the skid loader and backhoe out and removed a row of really big round bushes.  They had gotten so big that they were actually covering some headstones and made the driveway too narrow for the hearse and other cars to get through. I got to learn to drive the skid loader and help a little too.  It was fun.  I should've taken a picture of the big pile after they were all pulled out!

The groundskeeper has spread grass seed and you can hardly tell where these bushes were already.

 

He really made quick work of it.

this isn't me doing this!

More Spencer Fair

The first fun thing you see at the fair when you arrive is people on horseback directing you into your parking spot.

I did spend too much time in the building where the adult entries are - watching cherry pie judging.  It was very disappointing though.  I thought I would get some pie making tips by listening to their comments, but they didn't comment at all about why they gave good ribbons or not - not even at the end.  It was fun to meet the judge, Louise Piper, though since she is a former Rolfe resident, and I've talked to her on the phone before.  Her daughter helped her and she is the owner of Our Daily Bread Bakery in Algona and Bill went to school with her.  Louise's son traps on our property in the winter.

While I was waiting to see the winning pie, I wandered around and looked at the MANY jars of canned food, afghans and other creative things entered.  Of everything I saw that day, I was most impressed with this sewing machine cake!!

amazing detail

such pretty decorations above too

Spencer Fair

Every year, it's a tradition to go to the Clay County Fair in Spencer.  It's in September so something to look forward to at the end of summer.  People around here like it better than the Iowa State Fair.

We went this year and my favorite thing this time had to be the Braunschweig Pottery booth from Alta, Iowa near Storm Lake.  Connie had so many things made by pressing leaves into the clay.  I LOVE oak and gingko leaves and she uses lots of both.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of anything with the oak leaves.

gingko leaves on a lamp base

wall hanging

I bought this and love it.  I added the dried "grass/wheat", etc.  I had Bill save a couple of pheasant feathers for it.  It looks good on our great room wall next to the front window.  

If you love chocolate like we do . . . .

Unfortunately, Bill and I are chocoholics.  It's bad.  And our main thing we're addicted to is 
M & M's - plain ones.  I used to have vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup all the time and that would "do it" (my mom & dad owned a Dairy Queen for 17 years so maybe that had something to do with it!).  But now I crave brownies fairly often.  Homemade hot fudge syrup is to die for too.  I've posted the recipe for that from the old Amana cookbook already.  If you want to try it, look at my post categories on the right side and click on Recipes and then scroll down until you find it.  That is so good (and easy - make in the microwave) and better than any you can buy in a jar.

During harvest, Bill will have some kind of chocolate candy bar most days - usually a Snickers.  (since I admitted what I like, I had to mention what he likes too)  You've already heard that he LOVES apple pie, but if we don't have that, an Oreo after a meal will do.

I've made a couple of different recipes for "lava cake" but the latest one was this one.  It came from a newspaper and this one is called Grandma Lutz's Chocolate Sunday Cake.  But I'm just going to call it Lava Cake.  It ends up having gooey chocolate on the bottom and then chocolate cake on top.  You scoop it out of the baking dish with a spoon and serve warm with ice cream.  Yum!  Enjoy!  (***warning - it's very rich)

LAVA CAKE

Cake:
3/4 c. sugar
1 c. flour
3 T. cocoa
2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
1/2 c. milk
1/3 c. melted butter
1 1/2 t. vanilla
Sift together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt.  Mix milk, melted butter and vanilla.  Combine wet and dry ingredients in an 8-inch pan.

Topping:
1/2 c. brown sugar
4 T. cocoa
3/4 c. white sugar
   Combine brown sugar, cocoa and white sugar.  Sprinkle mix over cake batter.  DO NOT MIX IN.  Pour 1 1/4 c. hot water over entire dish.  DO NOT STIR.  Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes.  Serve warm with ice cream.
 

NW Iowa Women's Conf.

Here in NW Iowa, we're so very lucky to have an event like the NW Iowa Women's Conference to go to every year - right at Faith Lutheran Church, the church I go to. It was on Sat., Nov. 9th this year and was a nice day for women as usual - about 375 women, the most we've ever had attend.  

Carol Kent was the speaker. She speaks on how to live a new kind of normal when something bad happens to you.  Her story is that her son who went to the Naval Academy met and married a woman who had two small children.  He ended up murdering her ex husband.  Now Carol and her husband visit their only son in jail in Florida every weekend and that's where they spend their holidays. He is there for life with no chance of parole.

The women in charge of this conference do a great job from promoting it to the decorations to the lunch, the schedule, the music and even lots of door prizes.  My friend, Terri, and I helped Carol's husband sell her books during breaks.

Lunch was chicken salad with lots in it like grapes, apple and nuts, a pineapple cranberry salad, choice of potato or vegetable beef soup, roll and pumpkin pie - all made in our church kitchen.  We sat with some ladies that came by bus from Spencer and they were quite impressed that the food was not catered.

a table decoration

  

this was our lunch minus the soup

goodies to have when arriving

Insulation

This past week, the project around here was blowing insulation above the attic in the shed.  Bill bought the insulation from Community Lumber in West Bend.  They let you use the machines to do it with.  We used two of them.  Bill went up above with the two hoses and sprayed it all around while Tim and I fed the machines down below.

Bill said the bags of compacted insulation were 30 lbs.  You had to cut them in half with a knife and break the two chunks apart.  Half a bag is what fit in the machine at a time.  It wasn't hard and went fairly fast.  It only took about a day total to do.  I think the attic now has a R49 rating if that tells you anything.  The shed is now pretty well insulated. 

only 1 of the piles of empty bags

it looked like pink cotton candy once it was broken up

not fun wearing masks but very necessary

Eeeek!!!

Anybody that knows me knows that the one bug I'm scared of is a spider!!! I hate flies in the house but that's nothing compared to spiders!  Grandma R. used to kill them with her fingers - ewwwww!!!  No Way!  It's one of those things though that you can't wait for somebody else to kill them.  By the time they get home, who knows where it would be so I get a kleenex and wad it up and get 'em before they can get away and hide - or get me! 

So it's a little surprising that I thought it would be fun to make the following with Diane's little girls at Halloween time!  In a way, even if they're not real, it's kind of creepy to have spiders sitting on top of deviled eggs!  But the girls love olives and they were easy so we did it.  I made a big deal out of making them to surprise Uncle Bill. It was fun.  They really should probably have more legs but they were already big enough!  Lacey was impressed with the Pampered Chef tool we used to pipe in the egg filling.  She loves doing holiday food or crafts.

(The funny thing is that Bill won't eat olives, and I don't really care for them.  Look at all those olives in the middle!  The girls ate all of them by the end of the day!)

Bird Problems

Well, I've heard of three people that are wondering why I haven't posted for a while so today is the day to try to get some posts ready to go! We have been busy but mainly I'm STILL having problems with technology! I'm finally using only my new laptop and have gotten the things I use all the time where I want them and more importantly, know how to use them. Except for pictures. Still struggling with how to get them off my phone and organized so that finding them for blog posts is quick and easy. Not something I enjoy messing with. 

Today I've downloaded the ones I want from my phone and thought I had them deleted off of my phone but - they're still there. Ugh. So now I need to read my phone's instructions.

The latest project around here is insulating above the ceiling in the new shed. That job is done as of this morning and Bill is very happy. I "think" I have pictures of that to post if they didn't get deleted by mistake! 

Here are two I know I have. Last Christmas, thanks to my brother's idea, I gave Bill a weather station. It's a unit that he mounted on part of an old telephone pole. We LOVE being able to see how much rain we're getting as it comes down - from in the house! And lots of other weather info. too like wind speed & direction, humidity in and out. When it's raining hard it even says "it's raining cats and dogs!" But the problem with the rain has been that sometimes it gets clogged up since birds sit on top of it! We Googled "problems with Davis weather stations and birds" and found lots of ideas from people on things they've tried. Bill glued in a sink screen upside down and wired together a bunch of wire spikes! This should do the trick!