Happy Halloween!

With Pandora's Monster Mash providing our soundtrack, we lit jack-o-lantern 2.0 (jack 1.0 collapsed into goo early this morning), turned on the twinkly lights, and served candy through the spider webbing.  Once Mike and Eleanor (a Paleontologist) finally made it home from their neighborhood quest, and we shut it all down, Mike and I couldn't help but look back on Hallow's Eves past.  Some of that at the end of this post...

Eleanor made Kit's costume

 



 

2007 was the year Eleanor learned the protocals of the trick or treat.  She was 2.5.  We practiced with her at home... I caught a few of her first attempts on video and they totally make us laugh!  You can barely see anything, but you can hear her and she is a hoot.  (If you are on an iPad or other iProduct, you can't see these videos!  You should get to another machine, because they are funny.  Well, if you like to hear a little kid laugh and that sort of thing.)

More from the Hallow's Eve archives...


2005, age 8 months

2007, age 2.5

2009, age 4.5

2008, age 3.5

2010, age 5.5

2011, age 6.5



 





School Picture!

New Deck on Back Porch

This back porch was built just before our wedding in 2003.  The structure has held up just fine, however the deck surface and the crown molding trim was a total loss by 2010.  (Tongue and groove porch flooring rots quickly when not under a porch roof).  We finally got a new surface put on this week.  Here they are ripping off the rotten floor and then leaving us with the Ipe iteration.

Last Day Before the Rain

The weatherman notified us early this week that our future (a.k.a. a six-month sized rain cloud) would be moving in off the coast on Friday.  With T -20 hours 'till the rainy season, on Thursday the deck guys raced to get the seal-coat on the new wood while I raked leaves, moved in the stuff that is only out for the dry season, staked out plans for the spring veggie beds, vacuumed the lawn (every bit as unusual as it sounds, but it was the only solution I could come up with for a problem the deck guys created) and just generally battoned down the hatches.  Then I picked up Eleanor from school.  We decided to high-tail it out to Sauvie Island for an afternoon on a farm.  We tromped around, took a tractor hay-ride, ran the corn maze, and picked up some pumpkins.  It was dusty but a gloriously sunny fall day.

Sick Day

Eleanor had a fever the first two days this week so she stayed home sewing, reading, doing some artwork, and sitting by the fire. 

Eleanor's Laundry Delivery Machine

Eleanor and I talk about machines and this summer she started creating makeshift, pretend machines out of the recycle bin.  Here and there, all very pretendy, nothing attempting functional parts.  But recently she busily went to work making a laundry-in-the-basket machine in her room, so self driven I didn’t know anything about it until I stumbled into one night.  She crafted what were essentially pulleys, but as they were made from corks and cardboard they didn’t really work.  However, the concept was solid and really exciting to see come out of her brain.  Anyway she hooked this elaborate thing up across her room from the top bunk to the laundry bin in the closet (this is the second rigging system in her room, so it’s a bit like a spider’s den in there).  She couldn’t make it work exactly, as you might imagine with just tape and yarn and crappy supplies.  So one afternoon I bought a couple of small pulleys and some strong twine and left them in her room.  Just to see what would happen.  We came back from a date that night and Mikey + Joseph (Laura's boys, they were babysitting) had helped her reconstruct the whole apparatus into a semi-functioning "machine" that delivers laundry from the bed to the hamper.  You'll note from the video that she hasn’t figured out how to get the clothes to reliably fall off the line on cue, so if you have ideas speak up. 

Night of the Shark and Our Timeline

One weekend in early September (while Mike was at the Badger game in Corvallis), Eleanor, Sabina and I headed across the bridge to historical Fort Vancouver for "Night of the Shark."  Fort Vancouver was the British fur-trapper trading hub for this area way back in the day before American settlers started coming in, then it was one form of settler and military outpost.  Night of the Shark is a night-time reinactment of life in 1846 = an electricity free zone with kitchens that use giant wood fires, blacksmiths that use cool, firey blacksmith stuff and all of it is done by candle light and torches.  It was so great!  The night was cool and clear, and the kitchens were actually cooking so they were warm and smelled fantastic.  The blacksmiths were actually at work so the shop was warm and smelling of hot steel.  The volunteers were all in period dress and in character, as they were preparing to take in the refuges from the shipwrecked Shark downed near Astoria.  I couldn't get good photos of the coolest of these night-happenings, but before the sun went down the girls and I milled about the Oregon Trail settlement camps outside the fort, where they got to do laundry and play with period toys.



This whole evening was well worth the time and the throwing off of our nighttime schedule.  And, it was the final straw that launched our timeline project.  Eleanor likes historical auto/biographies, fictional and non-fictional alike.  From Oregon Trail diaries to Laura Ingalls to Johanna Reiss to Kit Kittredge.  I keep trying to tie other events we learn about to the timeline that runs right through the people she knows through these autobiographies, so we finally put marker to butcher paper and laid it all out on the wall.  We'll add as we go...