Meet Jack

Living in a sketchy neighborhood, it is very important that you carefully consider your pumpkin guardian at Halloween. Everyone knows how many spooky creatures roam the streets of Tucson toward the end of October. About a week ago, R and I bought the most perfectly shaped pumpkin ever and named him Jack.
These are R's prototypes for Jack.
He had to be 1. Really scary 2. unique and 3. really scary.

Hello Jack. Boy are you scary. Thanks for keeping away all the ghosts and ghouls. I'm real sorry about that time when Orbit ate your guts.

Go Dawgs!!!

42-30!!!!

Blumen!

Kacy's getting married this sunday, so this morning we had a bouquet making party. We bought a ton of gorgeous flowers (nice job Kacy!) and everyone worked together to make corsages, boutonneires (I had to look that up), and six bouquets.
So Pretty!

Naughty Orbit!

This picture isn't posed, I promise. This is how we found Orbit. He somehow found the bag of tobacco and the little corn cob pipe from Rob's Leprechaun costume from last Halloween. He smokes now? He's only four! Needless to say, we took this stuff away from the bad boy.

Standin' on the corner and fishin' in the lake

I went on two fun trips the last two weekends. First, I went to Winslow with my friend AJ. We slept in this pueblo that she built. It was really cool to watch the stars at night through this smoke hole in the roof. The next day, we burned the pueblo down as an archaeological experiment. She's looking at how fire behaves in prehistoric buildings and whether or not you can reconstruct the origin of the fire from the debris on the floor and the smoke patterns on the walls. I was looking at how many tree-rings are lost on the primary and secondary beams when the roof of a pueblo catches fire. That way I can know how far off tree-ring dates from a prehistoric charred log might be. Anyway, we came back very tired and very filled with smoke.
Last weekend I went with Ashley, Ryan, and Reggie to Lake Havasu to visit her family. We had a really really great time. It was very relaxing and felt like a much longer trip than the two days that it actually was. Plus, there were Yorkies!

My sister is a famous rapper

How to dress inappropriately for work: step one.

These are the shoes I decided to wear today. Normally they are very comfortable. Today, they were a bad bad idea. I'm not so good with heels in the first place, but I thought these would be fine since they're kinda clunky. So I put them on and hopped on my bike to ride the 1.5 miles to work. HA! Little did I know that riding my bike would be the easiest thing I did all day!


The morning went fine, other than two long walks all the way across campus to meet Rachel and Ashley and to go to a class. Then, I had some work to do in the wood shop, so I teetered over to the tree-ring lab. I used the band saw and a belt sander and got all covered in sawdust. Still fine, right? No big deal.
Two hours later I got to be a lab hero. We had some really important samples that needed to be sent to Oregon and Canada via the 5 o'clock FedEx. Well, we only finished working them up at about 4:56. Yipe! Me and my heels jumped on the bike and raced over to the dropbox. As I was turning into the street, I heard the clock chime 5:00. Crap! I was almost there when I saw the FedEx truck zooming away. Oh no! So I chased it. On my bike. In the heels. The packages were tucked under my arm and I pedaled really hard and caught up to the truck at the stop sign. I called to the driver and she took my packages. Whew!
I know. It was a lot of effort for some stupid trees, but I got to go back to the lab with a big grin.
Hurray.

p.s. this is the scene in the front yard this evening. There may be a dog in our future. R. is in love with these mongrels.

Dance

Here's a little gem from the Grand Canyon trip. This is the dance you have to do if you want to make it out of the Canyon.

Shower

Turns out, when you throw a shower, you don't really take a lot of pictures during the actual party. I really wanted to show you the tiny cakes I made, but by the time I brought them out, the party was already going on, and I couldn't take pictures of them. I also wanted to show you Kacy and all her presents, but I didn't do that either. So here's the deal, I'll show you some pictures I took the night before, and I'll promise to try and borrow some better pictures from the bride. Ok?

First up, here's the pom poms I hung from the ceiling. Orbit and Georgie thought it was cruel of me to hang such puffiness out of their reach. Tough luck for them.


These are some of the flowers. To me, Gerbera daisies mean weddings. So Kacy got dozens of them. Everywhere. I don't really have a lot of good vases, so I put some in tall glasses, some in a big shiny can, and some in this little square container. A few went in bud vases all by themselves. I like flowers to be all bunched up, so I had to cut them short and tie the ends with a twist tie that I hid beneath the water.

















For a shower activity, we all made soaps, bath salts, and bath scrubs (of course no pictures). These are the little bags I made for everyone to put their treats in. To put the scrub in, I cleaned out a bunch of baby food jars (perfect size, perfect price, disgusting contents!) and glued pretty paper with swirly trimmed edges to the outside.
I think everybody had a good time. I know I did.

Happy October!