Pumpkin Walk

Every October, a nearby town has an annual tradition they call the Pumpkin Walk. Originally it was started by a local homeowner, but it has long since outgrown the yard and is now held in a local park. This year, it is being held from October 20th to 25th. Participants are given a theme and then allowed to create from there. From the pictures, you will see that any sort of squash can be used...not just pumpkins!

It is always amazing to see the creativity of the participants. Some entries are done by individuals and some by groups. We even saw entries by school classes as we went through it this year. There is no charge to viewers, and a local cookie factory even provides each guest with a cookie. How can you beat that?

Do you remember the Richard Scarry books that always had a little character to find in each picture? This year, each scene had a little yellow squash hidden in it somewhere.

Here are some pictures from scenes we saw as we walked through earlier this evening.


Porcupine




Octopus










Busytown!











The local football team



Candyland game



I liked the little squashes they used to make the flowers.





Calvin and Hobbs are always popular.





Winnie the Pooh and friends







Animals at the zoo





no explanation needed...right?




Hard to tell from the picture, but this one actually has a little waterfall coming out of the pumpkin's mouth.



Bambi and friends



Christmas Story











It's amazing the variety of things people have thought of!

Baby Blessing -- times 2

Once they realized their babies would be only a few weeks apart in age, my girls have been planning to have their babies blessed on the same day. It certainly was more convenient for family who had to travel to attend. Then they found out they were both to have little girls.

Well...today was the big day, and you can see, they dressed up for the occasion.

Here is the older of the little girls.





Here she is with her family.





Her younger cousin was also blessed today. She had a nice visit with her great-grandma while she waited for her turn.








Here she is with her mom and dad.



It was fun to have matching dresses. We hope they will grow up to be best friends as well as cousins.



Time to go home, after a long but special day:

Apple Harvest

With reports of storms coming later in the week, I went out and tasted one of the apples today. When I've done it before, they have been pretty sour, but today the apple tasted wonderfully sweet and juicy, so we decided it was time to harvest the apples. We actually ended up with 2-3 bushels of apples from our little tree. No wonder the branches were hanging down so low!



The woodworker must have done a good job of thinning them. I think he must have pulled 2/3 of the apples off the tree, but it left the remaining apples to grow nice and large.



We look forward to some delicious eating now!

Hello, Hollywood!

After the reunion, rather than driving all the way home late at night, we decided to spend the rest of the weekend visiting with nearby family and watching General Conference. I just couldn't resist taking the picture of little Susanna.



We enjoyed visiting with grandchildren. In addition to watching conference, we also watched '17 Miracles' together. We had a pleasant ride back home on Sunday evening without all the game traffic.

A Perfect Storm...or is it a perfect traffic jam?

We thought it would be fun to attend a missionary reunion...but we had NO idea what we were getting in to! Ordinarily, it would take us maybe 2 1/2 hours to reach the reunion location. We were scheduled to work with the school groups until 2:30 which left us plenty of time to drive to the reunion which started at 6:30.

Then we started hearing on the radio that people living in our area who planned to travel to the reunion location should allow 4 hours of travel time! The perfect 'travel' storm was in place. It was a combination of road construction, Friday afternoon commuter traffic, and an in-state rivalry football game.

Fortunately we were able to leave work 20 half an hour earlier than we expected, so we were able to arrive in time, in spite of traffic moving at a crawl for many miles.

Watching the school flags flying from cars around us on the freeway reminded us of when we lived in West Virginia on days when WVU was playing. Cars would fly past us on the freeway going north to Morgantown with flags whipping in the wind. It was a good day to stay OFF the freeway actually.

In any case, we made it to our reunion and enjoyed visiting with old friends.













One of the highlights, other than the old friends, was a fancy cake that was on the refreshment table. We laughed when we saw it, because it just epitomized some of our West Virginia experiences.



We hope to be able to attend future reunions, but would not mind if it was not held in the same time and place as a big rivalry game creating a traffic jam.