Dave and I lately

Life has been busy and fun lately. I have been restraining myself on the project front, much to Dave's relief. There has been plenty for him to do without me adding to his load!

 As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the fan in our laptop pooped out. The laptop would only run for about 10 minutes before overheating, so we couldn't use it at all. Other than the fan, the laptop still runs great, so we didn't want to replace it, so Dave decided to just replace the fan. After the correct fan came in the mail, Dave (who had been watching lots of YouTube videos on fan replacement on our iTouch) did a little bit of surgery, and TA-DA! Now the laptop is good as new. I have said it a million times, but I am so incredibly grateful that Dave is as handy as he is. We save so much money because of his skills!

The tree in the backyard was gorgeous again this year. We tried to take a picture of it every day so we could watch it progress, but life got in the way. So here are a couple of highlights:

 Pardon the terrible picture. We had some volunteer sunflowers in our front flowerbed this summer. When I cleaned out the flowerbed, I decided to leave the flowerheads for the birds. A brave squirrel made his way onto the porch and enjoyed quite the feast the other day.

 These are the cute pumpkins we made for a MOPS craft a couple of weeks ago. I love how chunky and chubby they are.

 I am really missing my weekly trips to the Farmers' Market now that cold weather has set in. The last time Hank and I went, we found gorgeous brussels sprouts. I had never seen them on the stalk before and I thought they were so cool!

 Here are some of the tomatoes we harvested from the garden. At the end of September, the forecast indicated we were going to have a really heavy frost, and most of our tomatoes weren't ripe. We stripped the bushes and put them in boxes to ripen. As the tomatoes ripened, I canned a batch of stewed tomatoes, then made a huge amount of spaghetti sauce. It was my first attempt at spaghetti sauce and I have to say, it turned out SO well. Spaghetti sauce is way more labor intensive than I was anticipating, but it was totally worth the effort.

 Here are the "guts" of the tomatoes after I'd run the cooked tomatoes through the food mill. Jed was delighted to see some more guts!

At another MOPS meeting, I was asked to teach a bread class. I was a little nervous, but the girls were all eager to learn and we had a really good class. I had so much fun helping and answering questions. Everyone went home with a batch of dough and so many of them posted pictures of their finished loaves on our Facebook page. One of my loaves turned out wonky, but it still tasted amazing!

As you can see, there's never a dull moment at our house, even if it mostly revolves around food!