Getting Stocked Up

Today was a wonderfully dreary October day.  It rained fairly steadily for our side of Washington and the fire roared for most of the day in the living room making the house so toasty by this evening that we had to open the front door to let in some of that cool moist air.

This weekend was one of catch-ups.  We had picked the last of the red tomatoes from our garden on Tuesday and on Saturday we were superheroes! We blanched six grocery bags of tomatoes, sauced 33 cups of them and made marinara sauce out of them, stewed the last of them getting another 13 pints and sent all of those through the canner!  Phew!!

That's right...I'm not above getting some help with the spices!  Rosemary...that's a spice, right?

Yes...that's sugar.  But only 1/4 cup sugar for 11 cups of pureed tomatoes...not bad I'd say.

Then on Sunday we were DVR heroes!  We caught up on most all of our shows and I have to say that Forever and Madam Secretary are two of my new favorites!  I'm really sorry this post is so full of exclamation marks...I really need to try and calm down.  It's just that when we start to get really into fall I'm just so happy.  Is that weird?  I love the battening down of the hatches and the fires in the evening.  The sweaters and the poor weather (it's a nice change from that relentless summer sunshine) and the warm drinks.  I made pumpkin bars this weekend and I think I feel the need to make cookies soon.  Or pumpkin spice bagels.  Or cookies and bagels.  And then I need to exercise...

Sending Gifts to Myself

Does anyone else love it when you get home and there is a package waiting for you?  Today was that sort of day for me!  I thought that the item I ordered was coming on the 20th, but instead it arrived today!!  Eeeee!  And look at what it was...

Oh I'm so excited!  I have all sorts of soups and stews and roasts envisioned for that pot.  I've had soup on the brain since the weather has turned a bit cooler and the leaves started changing.  We tried a butternut squash soup this week that was...eh.  I think I put in too much ginger, or else the recipe called for too much according to my taste.  Better scratch the carrot-ginger soup I had on my Pinterest board.  But I have the ingredients for this Potato Tarragon Soup (I'm axing the spicy part).  Or there's always our perfected (in our opinion) Clam Chowder.  Which to pick?  Depending on the weather this weekend, it may be both!

Memory Montage Lightroom Class

You all know that I got a new camera this year, a pretty sweet DSLR that I LOVE.  I think the level of my pictures has really gone up thanks to the f/1.8 lens for those close up shots and the 18-55 mm lens did a great job on my trip to London and most recently to the beach.  Yes, we went to the beach after all this summer.  Well, it was October but it felt like August!  The weekend was sunny and the skies were clear (without the usual fog that accompanies clear skies at the beach)!  We were able to watch the sun set over the water and saw the green flash both times!  We also walked down to Sea Level Bakery + Coffee every morning for cappuccinos and the most amazing Maple Bourbon Pecan Cinnamon rolls you have ever eaten.  The coffee was so pretty on the top and I NEVER took a single picture!  Arrghhh!  What is wrong with me?!  The mantra of all lifestyle bloggers is:  Photograph your food before you eat it!  The weekend was just really fantastic and all because Surfsand Resort was having a deal on limited view rooms.  Even though we weren't in our favorite oceanfront room it was an amazing weekend (and the fact that we only paid what we usually pay for 1 night oceanfront and got 3 nights in return really helped).  The dogs were happy to get a weekend of our undivided attention and we were happy to walk the beach and smell the salty air.

Right before we left I had found out that a local photography studio was having a weekend "Photography Essentials" class.  Memory Montage Photography hosts these classes a few times a year and in the spring I'd missed it.  Well it turns out I was going to have to miss this one too because it was on a Saturday I worked (the one of the 12 hour shift as it turns out).  They also had a "Lightroom Class" on a Tuesday that I would be able to make.  I really do want to learn how to get myself off of Auto mode on my camera and now I know I really need to start shooting in RAW, but mostly my photos are okay.  There had been some thought to just starting with some editing to make them better and I wasn't sure which software to use.  The Lightroom software was big on the Pinterest boards and I'd heard good things from my Uncle Fred (the sounding board for all things tech related to make sure I'm not choosing poorly) so I went ahead and bought it.  Yesterday was my class and it was awesome!  The things you can do to make a good picture a great picture with this software is incredible.  And the class helped me be able to jump right in and get editing without having to read a boring manual (of which none was provided with the software).  I've forgotten how fun it is to learn something you are interested in and how eager you can feel about something.  All day today I wanted to get home and start editing!  If anyone wants to learn more about Lightroom I highly recommend their class.  And now without further ado, some photos I edited from my recent trip to the beach, along with their unedited counterparts underneath.  They were all from a sunset walk and I wanted to capture the feeling of the intense low angle sunlight.

Randomly On a Monday

This weekend I was the lucky girl who got to work 12 hours on Sat and 10 hours on Sun!  I know, right?!  So of course by Sunday I was pretty braindead and the only thing going through my head was autumn-fall-pumpkins-candles-blankets-apples.  To quell the murmurings of that obnoxious voice I started a new Pinterest board.  

Oh the wonders of this Pinterest board!  It wraps you up in orangy-yellowish-red hued warmth and settles you in for a warm cup of....well whatever you'd want.  For me it would still currently be tea, but maybe your more of a coffee or cocoa or even hot apple cider kinda person.  Though as it gets colder I'm leaning back towards coffee.  There's just something about the robustness of it.  And I really like vanilla lattes, but mostly iced and not so much hot, so then I'm tended towards pumpkin spice, but I don't want to become a cliche.

I've already watched one of my favorite "fall" movies, You've Got Mail.  I'm not sure why I think of it as a fall type movie, other than it has one of the best lines that describes the feeling I get when I see school supplies being set out in the stores, "Bouquets of newly sharpened pencils."  Still to go on the list are Practical Magic (good any time of the year, in my opinion), Hocus Pocus (a classic and a must), Haunted Mansion (just for the barbershop quartet heads), Bewitched (if only I could own all of Nicole Kidman's clothes in that movie...and that house....and car....and powers...) and Lady in White (about as scary as scary movies get in this house).

In actual real world decorating (and not just virtual), I have been slowly moving my pumpkins on to the porch along with my never-dead jack-o-lanterns.  They are just waiting for the timer strip to be plugged in and then I'll be welcomed home harvestly everyday.  (After a successful Home Depot trip they are currently out there smiling because they are all lit up!)  The rest of the house is a disaster, but from the outside it looks like I have it together.  A weekend should remedy that, but it's still a few days away.

Oh!  And this morning Mom and I managed to be in exactly the right place at the right time!!  We were driving down our street and right, I mean completely in the direction we were driving and looking, in front of us a metor streaked through the sky!  It burned up pretty quickly and only lasted less than a second, but it was SO AWESOME!  If we hadn't been late to work, we'd never have seen it ;)  Kismet, I'd say.