Week 45 & 46 - Is your mouth watering too?

I'm sitting here watching Pushing Daisies. It's one of the new tv shows I decided watch this fall season after the heart breaking demise of two of my favs, Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars. I didn't want to love again, but I am in love. The shows premise is weird, which attracted me to it initially, but it turned out to be sweet and cute and just eccentric enough for Troy to enjoy it too. Troy is at the Garage and I'm in love with Ned. Sat. - Sun., 11/10-11/07: Leaves and baby girl. Our very good friends Mark and Jodie, had a little baby girl. Unfortunately, we were sick when she was born and we had to wait a week to see her. We got to meet little Anna Catherine on Saturday. And she is a cutie. To help take some of the pressure off of mom and dad, we raked all of their leaves on Sunday. I've never raked leaves for someone that wasn't related to me or whoever I was with. Before. After. We made them into piles and then pushed them onto this big tarp. I really wish that I could do this everyday because there is no better work out than this. How can you not screw around with this many leaves? This is Troy at the top of a very large mountain. After all that work, I HAD to take a nice break. Sat. 11/17/07: My kitchen: Baby pies. Troy's family had Thanksgiving early. We wanted to make something memorable but yet a step up from last years Hucklebuckle. Oh, and we have a load of huckleberries. We decided to make mini-huckleberry pies. Were they good, you ask? Hells yeah. So fantastic. Fan-frickin-tastic. So good, my mouth just actually watered. After some debate, we bought these little muffin pans. Actually the first pans that we bought were from Bed, Bath and Beyond. After visiting Walmart for piggy bedding, we found the same brand of pan, but much larger for half the price. I used Pilsbury Pie dough and used a 1/4 c. measuring cup to cut out little circle. Then we filled them with a mixture of berries, sugar, corn starch and orange zest. They only took about 2 tablespoons each. The little pies were looking a little bit plain, so we worked up some lattice with the left over dough. It was a pain but worth it. Here is a finished pie. You have to take them out of the pan quickly while they are still hot because the juice will congeal and stick to the side of the pan. But, the juice is also hot and sticky and probably resembles napalm. We both got burned. I'm going to make another batch for xmas, so get your orders in now! Monday, 11/19/07: My Living Rooom: Pig Cozy. Our little fatty, Toofy Von Schnauzer, got a bit of a cold this week. The vet doesn't think it's anything serious and the only thing visually wrong with him is a little bit of a runny nose. I got really worried about the drafts gusting through this old house so I made both Toofy and Luke covers for their cage. Here is Toofy after eating a large carrot. He's a freaking mess. Here is the pinning process. I think that I could benefit from sewing classes and everything that I do is probably wrong. I really like to cut corners and I'm impatient. I'm sure that there is a way to make a pattern and do this all official, but I just pinned everything like I was making a skirt or a cover for the couch. Luke didn't really appreciate me hijacking his cage like so. I'm not very good at walking a straight line, let alone cutting one. It doesn't help that this fabric is lined. It took some finagaling but I got them together. This is the first cover. After I turned it right side up, I saw that the corner flap was a little crooked. This was the only really big mistake and that is impressive for me. Here is the finished cover for Luke. It looks a lot better in person and I can't help but to think that it looks "Real." It looks like I bought it and that is the best compliment I can give myself. Another week over! November is so close to being over, as is this year. I am running out of weeks! It's exciting!!! One thing that we want to do before the end of the year is paintball. We are running out of weeks, just about 5 left, so I don't know if it will get done before the end of this year. If you want to paintball, or if you know of a good place to visit, let me know ASAP. I'm thinking if we can do it, it's Dec 8/9 or 15/16. No shooting me in the face.