Halloween Spider Egg Sac

These are the yarn soaked in glue and wrapped around a balloon.   We made three but only one made it to the hardened stage.  We wrapped the string around a water balloon and two of them popped as the glue was drying, I don't think those balloons are as thick as regular as their main purpose is to break.  If we made these again we would use string or embroidery thread instead of yarn.  The spiders are rings that clipped right on.

It is hanging from our dining room light this is our view of the sac. 

Halloween Monster Corner Book Marks

These are book marks that you slip over the corner of a page in a book.  We made one and then Dancer really took off and made a whole mess of monsters.  This is only a few of the ones she made.  I love all the different teeth she gave them.

To make these, you first need to make a template.  In the corner of a sheet of paper draw a 2.5 inch by 2.5 inch square.  To the top and to the right of it draw two more squares the same size.  To the top cut the left side of the square off and to the right cut the bottom of the square off at an angle right through the middle of it to make a rocket shape. 

Cut out one shape using the template and two smaller triangles in a coordinating color, we didn't have a template for these, just sort of eyed them in the corners of the paper.

Fold the left "rocket tail" over half of the square and then the right half over the left half or vice versa.

Glue the top of the first half to stick the two "rocket tails" together.  Add the two colored triangles and then decorate to make a monster.  Dancer did use an envelope for the eyes and teeth because regular copy paper wasn't heavy enough. These would also be cute as Santas or other holiday characters.

Slip it over the corner of a book to mark your spot.  This one was eventually made into a monster.

This one, to Dancer's disbelief, I left just a plain old ordinary book mark.  It was all she could do not to add at least eyes on it.  I show this one too because I made it with printed scrap booking paper that was only printed on one side so I needed to cut out two pieces of the rocket template and glue them together or else either the top or the bottom was white.  Never folding scrapbook paper before it never dawned on me that it is only printed on one side.   

Halloween Owl Treat Bags

Made these little bags for the 4-H Halloween party that is coming up.  The candy in the bags is Rolos and the top is made from a paper bag, because that is all we had for brown, and a very little bit of construction paper.  The kids and I whipped these out in just a couple of minutes.  One bag of Rolos, after sampling a couple, made eight bags with six Rolos each. 

What Vidalia Brings to Potlucks

Halloween Spider Eggs

Made these this morning for breakfast and had them waiting when Dad and Spark, Dancer doesn't eat fried eggs, came in from doing the barn chores.  I had a hard time getting them perfectly done.  I like eggs over easy but I needed to still have the yolk yellow but with no snot on them because that just grosses me out.  To get the tops done the bottoms were getting brown.  The legs are piped on with mustard and the eyes with ketchup.  That solves the argument over which is better on eggs, mustard or ketchup.  To get the condiments to come out in thin lines I had to put them in a sandwich bag and cut off just the very little tip of the corner of the bag.  These were pretty fun!

We Had A Busy Day

Fall Walks

Being outdoors in the fall is such a treat for the eyes.  We were down by a river that still has a railroad bridge over it.  In our area there aren't a lot of railroad lines left as most have been made into walking/biking trails.  There was a lot of wildlife here to keep us entertained.  We watched an otter scamper on the other side of the river, he was checking out every tree and dipping in and out of the water.  He must have known we were of no threat on the opposite shore as he didn't even seem to look at us.  Even though he didn't act like it I assume he was well aware we were there.

Dancer took this picture of a shallow pool under the bridge, really liked her composition here.

Granite ghost.  Most of the rock here is granite and there are big quarries and there are chunks of granite everywhere - parks, businesses, road ways, parking lot dividers or just dumped by the river to protect the shore from erosion where someone put their artistic flare on it.

God must love the 70's, here he made outdoor shag carpet in the popular 70's color harvest gold.  When Dad and I bought our first house it had a harvest gold fridge and as a kid I had a harvest gold phone.  Wonder how long until that decorating color comes back, you know it will.

 

Heading back up over the railroad tracks.  I didn't even know Dancer had taken this picture until we got home and downloaded them.

My Mother, She'd Bake Thee A Bannock

We have been reading "The Door In The Wall" in which John-go-in-the-Wynd keeps telling Robin that if he were to visit his mother she'd bake thee a bannock.  Wondering what all the fuss was about over this bannock we decided to make a loaf. 

Bannock 

2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup white flour
1 tsp. salt
1 1/4 tsp. soda
2 Tbsp. butter at room temperature
1 1/4 cup buttermilk

Combine the dry ingredients and work the butter in until the mixture resembles moist bread crumbs.  Add buttermilk and mix until moist and sticky, this can take a few minutes.  Keep kneading until it is no longer sticky adding flour if needed.  Turn into a 8x8 greased pan.  Cover the pan, use foil if you don't have a cover.  Preheat oven to 425 degrees and bake for 30 minutes.  Reduce heat to 325 degrees and bake for another 15 minutes.  The bannock is done when wooden toothpick comes out clean and dry.  Remove from oven and cool on cooling rack.  Do not cut the bannock before it is cold.

I was surprised at how brown the bannock got for being bake with a cover on it.

Even more so, I was surprised that the crust was flaky.

Trying to be traditional to the times, we broke the bread with our hands assuming they wouldn't have carried a knife with them if they took this with for their lunch.  The inside has the texture of a dense cake or a muffin. 

We all thought this was absolutely wonderful and Spark enjoyed his with some honey.  I would definitely go over the path beyond the river, across yon field, and through the forest, then fording the stream and up another field, through another wood, and just there this side of the church in the village of Tripheath to a tiny bit of a house on the heath where his mother lives with her cat to have her bake thee a bannock.

Medieval Spiced Meat

We have read that in Medieval times cooks added a lot of spices to their meat.  One theory is that their meat was less than fresh and that is why they spiced it.  Given what the price of spices would have been in the day they probably didn't waste them on rotten meat. 

Many of the spices they did use are not readily available in our area or the price for the little bit we would use for one recipe puts them out of our reach.  One spice that was liberally was cinnamon, prompting us to find a recipe that used cinnamon.  We sort of found a recipe but changed it up to fit in with the other ingredient we had on hand. 

1 lbs. ground pork

1/3 box pearl barley
1/3 tsp. allspice
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 c. ground onion
Salt & pepper to taste

Brown pork and beef until completely cooked. Cook pearl barley in water according to package directions. When all water is absorbed but not dry, add ground meat, spices and onion. Mix well and serve as a breakfast meat with bread, honey or syrup as desired.  The only thing we left out was ground cloves which was called for in a 1/3 tsp. and to mix hamburger with the pork. 

We decided to eat it like hash with fried eggs.  Not sure we will ever make it again, we are not use to cinnamon on our meat, but everyone did have seconds.

Finding Chlorophyll In Leaves

In the fall, when the days get shorter, trees stop the process photosynthesis.  When this happens the chlorophyll, the pigment that makes the plant green, starts to fade and other colors, yellows, reds and oranges, then come out that have been in the leaves all summer but we were unable to see.

To find the chlorophyll that is in the leaves we did this simple experiment.  Using three different kinds of leaves, we used wood vine, sugar maple and silver maple leaves, we chopped them all in little, tiny pieces.  The smaller the better.

We put the leaves in three jars and covered the leaves with rubbing alchol and loosely covered the jars with the lids.

The jars were set in a shallow dish with a couple of inches of hot water.  Every few minutes we would swirl the leaves in the jar and put new hot water in the pan to keep the jars hot.  We did this for about an hour until the alcohol in the jars was dark green.

We removed jars from water and uncovered. Into each jar we placed a strip of filter paper (we used a milk filter but coffee filters could be used) so that one end was in the alcohol. The other end we bent over the top of the jar.  We left the strips in the jars for a few hours and the alcohol traveled up the paper bringing the colors with it. After a couple hours the colors were on the strips and the alcohol had dried.  We were able to see different shades of green, yellows and even some red chlorophyll from the leaves.

It's Too Nice Not To Blow Off School

When you live where it is possible to have snow on the ground eight months out of the year, you take advantage of nice days October.  This month has been unseasonably warm here in the great white north, we have hit over 80 degrees a couple of times in the last few days.  Our norm for this time of year would be about 60 degrees for a day time high.  On the weather they said today broke a record from back in 1890 something.  If these temps only come around every 130 years I feel it is our duty to enjoy them.

We spent the late afternoon taking the canoe out, hopefully not for the last time.

Dad helped them get all their fishing gear and themselves into the canoe.  For some reason this step always invokes quibbling between them.

Off they paddle.

It seems every single time they have to go through the rushes, the turn must be too sharp from the dock to the lake.

They made it right through and were on their way.  They have gotten quite proficient at paddling and steering the canoe.  We taught them the old fashion way, put them both in the canoe and shove them off to figure it out for themselves.  Through trial and error they learned.

After Spark and Dancer came in, Dad went out with Dancer to try fishing in a little cove across the lake.  I fished off the dock but only got one fish that was nothing to brag about.  As it was getting duskier the mosquitoes started to dine on us.  Spark and I decided to call it quits when we needed two hands to swat at them all and drove to a side road where we could see the cove, we couldn't see it from the dock, to make sure Dad and Dancer were still afloat.  They were so we headed home to start chores and dinner.

We realized that Dad had the house keys in his pocket out on the lake so we did the chores and then waited on the porch for them to get home.  It was a happy sight to see them drive in.

Five Contacts

My cell phone was in a sad, sad state.  It has never really held a charge, it is always going in and out of the service area and it's screen had gone blank.  Today we stopped to put it out of my misery and get a new one.  After picking out a new one, the service guy hooked the old one and new one up to some machine to transfer the data from one to the other.  It gets all done and the man says, "You only had five contacts transfer."  Oh good, I thought, now I don't have to program all those numbers back in, actually I would have had Spark do it.  He said it again and asked if that could be right.  Yeah, how many do other people have?  Between 300 and 600.  Seriously?  I don't even know that many people and I surely wouldn't call them on the phone if I did.  So instead of feeling like a loser who has only added five contacts on her phone in the last six years, and one I just put on this summer when Dancer got her phone, I have decided that my phone contacts are A-list people in my life.  Dancer, Dad, our home phone, Grandma Pat, and one of my friends, who I so rarely call I found out today had gotten a new phone number a couple of years ago, are on my A-list!

Not Sure What To Do

We stopped at a rest area on the freeway this past weekend and were confronted with this.

What could this possibly mean?  Is it just as it looks, need to only do #1 go to the left or if it's #2 go to the right.  Is there better ventilation or stronger flushage on the right?  Or is that women are known for going to the restroom in groups?  A single woman to the left or if there are two or more in your group go to the right?  Curious, we check them both out and couldn't find any difference so we are still not sure if we used the right one.

New Vocabulary Word

We made up a new word this afternoon: snoopervisor.  A snoopervisor is someone who sticks their nose in your business and gives unsolicited advice.  Not that we had anyone that snoopervised today, it actually came up about the dog.  I was making dinner and Dancer was holding the dog in the kitchen by where I was cooking and Nikki was looking really interested in what I was making.  Dancer said Nikki could be the snoopervisor.  Nikki was snooping but her only advice would be to give her a treat.

Renaissance Festival

School day at the Renaissance Festival meant cheap, cheap tickets and we hadn't been for a few years so we signed up as soon as we saw the announcement about it.  The festival sent out the tickets, a poster, schedule and a unit study by UPS which I wasn't expecting, what a nice surprise.  I thought we would pick our tickets up at the ticket window and that would be that. 

Our habit of liking to sleep in payed off.  Everyone else we knew that was going was planning on getting there at 9:00 a.m. when the Faire opened.  I filled our time in as 10:00 a.m. because with a two hour drive to get there getting up at 7:00 was going to be early enough for us.  We were watching the news before we left and there was a fire in one of the building on the grounds, a propane tank blew up at a chicken vendors Shoppe.   The news said they were going to opening late but we decided that we would leave anyway and if they weren't open by 10:00 we would just do something else until they did.  Turns out they opened at 10:00.  Perfect timing.  Well, not absolutely perfect we got there at 10:30 but still.  Wait, maybe perfect timing because we didn't have to wait in much of a line to get in by then.  School day is the perfect day to go, this is our second time going on this day, there is no waiting to get into the festival, I have heard of people waiting hours in traffic just to get on the grounds, and the parking lot is only about 20% full the entire day.  Also most of the school kids that come from schools have already left by about 1:30 or 2:00 and there are no crowds.

We mostly walked around and checked out the shops.  At a hat shop Spark tried on a leather pirate hat.  When he took it off the sales guy said we wouldn't buy it any way because it was $150.  Then he went on to say it was the same kind of hat Johnny Depp wore in Pirates of the Caribbean and how much he hates the make up Johnny Depp wore in the movies.  So in the matter of 30 seconds he deemed that we couldn't afford anything he was selling and insulted one of Dancer's favorite movies.  Wonder how sales went the rest of the day?  We saw a fun juggling show but because of the fire he wasn't on his regular stage and so didn't do all of his usual tricks.  Excellent none the less.  We also so a knife throwing/danger show and couple of comedy acts.  A lot of the humor was quite adult, which surprised me for school day, but maybe they assumed school kids know all that "stuff" anyway?  One of the neatest things we saw was a turtle display where a turtle was snarfing down slugs.  We have never seen a turtle eat in real life.  I was so enthralled with it that we didn't even get a picture.  Not that a turtle eating slugs would have been the most exciting picture if you weren't there to see it.  One of those had to be there things.

We were looking forward to having a calzone.  Only sell them on the weekends.  Same with Gelato.  Dancer wanted a falafel on a stick because we missed it at the state fair but none were to be found.  We wondered if the stand was in the part that was closed off from the fire.

A full armor suit for a knight.  They must have been much shorter back then.

Oh, wait, no they weren't!  I don't think that little guy would have stood a chance next to Goliath no matter how strong is armor would have been.

The entrance to the Hobbit hole.

In the Enchanted Secret Garden.  This was very nicely done with lots of little fairy houses and pools in the woods.

Twig the fairy.

A magical stone from Twig complete with fairy dust.  There was other dust at the event as well.  You can't tell in these pictures but there were clouds of dust rolling about the Faire.  Afterwards, we were all blowing our noses.  It probably added some authenticity to the experience.

Spark rode an elephant.  Four dollars to ride around in a little circle once seemed like a lot but he thought it was worth it.  I know how much it costs to feed a goat so that price probably wasn't all that out of line when you think what it costs to feed an elephant.

How often do you get to ride an elephant?  Not often so it gets two pictures.  As an aside, when Dancer was a wee little girl I took her to the circus.  There was an elephant there that was giving rides.  We got in the long, long line and waited and waiting for our turn.  As soon as we got to the front of the line she says, "That elephant stinks, I'm not getting on him!"  Back to our seats we went.

Spark found this hilarious because of Sponge Bob.  He thought it warranted a picture because it was so funny.

Dancer in fairy land sitting on a toadstool.

The King and Queen in our family.

Princess Dancer.  She has bright orange lips because she just finished eating frozen orange ice, which was super yummy by the way.  Dancer wearing her new sweatshirt (K.U. not coo)  She gets lot of comments about it, including one tunic clad lad who's "dad was a Jayhawk".

The best part of Spark's day was getting an ocarina, here is playing with his eyes closed just like Link does on Zelda.  It really makes a beautiful sound so when he played it all the way home in the car it didn't make us crazy and want to throw it out the window.  He also got song sheets for all the songs on the game.  That vendor knew her audience and how to sell them unlike the hat guy.

We were with a couple other homeschool kids we know when we came upon this.  The first thing they all said was, "Can we touch it?"  What about foaming, blue, poisonous dragon pee makes you want to touch it?

We finished off the day by finding a couple geocaches, can't go anywhere without finding a few especially when we were so far from home, and a stop at Five Guys for burgers.  The burgers were soooo good.  I think mostly because we only go there once, maybe twice a year, and we almost never eat at a restaurant so it was a huge treat not to be eating lunch/dinner we brought with.  We had a fun, fun day!