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October’s been a hoppin’ month so far! So much so in fact, that only now am I finally getting around to flickring and blogging about some of my autumnal adventures.

Phweph. Downtime, it’s a good thing.

Anyway, first in line is the Appling trip that Rita, Ben, Sam and I went on to get enough lovely, round globes of tart sweetness to make our own cider-yummmmm!

Lucky for us cider-happy peeps, South 47 Farm in Redmond was having a harvest festival. After wandering through the corn maze, gawking at the wooly cuteness of the alpacas, and coveting the squashes, we filled up our baskets with apples, onions and a bonanza of squash and buzzed on home to clean off the cider press Rita had discovered under her house.

We loaded up the machine while Sam boinged about excitedly on the trampoline and crunch, crunch, MUNCH! it ate up all the apples and yielded a lovely, bubbly, brown cider.

Go see the pics!

Soooooooooooo goooooooood! You could taste the crispness of the apples singing in the rich, thickness of the gorgeous brew.

But that was only the beginning of the apply goodness… Ben proceeded to make an OMG delicious apple pie for after-burrito dessert and I took home a jar of cider that would later evolve into cider brownies and cider cocktails and hot apple cider…………

I love fall.

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Chicken pox, I keel you ten thousand times!

Or maybe I should say, secondary infections, I keel you, you gross, nasty, mean, opportunistic little bastards.

Poor Sam, not fun having your already sore, itchy blisters scrubbed. Sometimes being a momma’s just meanness incorporated.

>_<

..but the boy’s got chicken pox, so it’ll just have to pile up until he’s off to his dad’s for the week.

Back to stacks of movies and books and my spot-spangled boy-

Autumn blew in today, blustering great whirls and swoops of redgold leaves every which way.

Time to harvest the ‘maters:

…and make salsa:

Holy Jalapenos, Batman! Yum.

Gandalf blow a ship through one of these.

October 4th is the last day you can register to vote in Washington State. Past elections have shown us that every vote counts. The person we register today could be the vote that makes the difference for Barack Obama, Chris Gregoire, or any of our candidates.

But that’s only part of the story. Did you know that even if you are registered, your voter registration may be marked as Inactive?

1.
Click here to register to vote or change your address. You may need to reregister if you’ve moved or changed your name. Encourage your unregistered friends to visit this site.
2.
Click here to make sure your voting status is set to Active.
3.
When you do get your ballot, send it in as soon as you can. In the primary, a surprising number of ballots were unintentionally postmarked after the deadline.

For more information or if you have any other questions, visit the Voter Information page.

Taught my first clay class today at Magnusson community center today.

I brought my basket of hand-carved rattles and proceeded to show the kids how to make them, at least those of the children who weren’t already digging in to their own projects the instant I opened the bags!

I’d been warned about these homeschoolers(and their very involved parents) and how independent they are and indeed, one of the moms came on pretty strong, marching into the classroom with her kid peeking out behind her and delivering her ‘OK, Ms New Teacher, this is my kid and he’s going to do whatever he wants’ proclamation, but really, it was no big thang, once they figured out I was there to help them play with clay, not teach the fun out of everything, all of us dug right in and proceeded to make rattles, or dragons or cats or wierd insectoid probosci.

Clay, kids, fun and I get paid?

Sounds good to me!

Added even more sand bunny(not to mention Led Zeppelin) goodness to my PNE sand sculpture set on flickr.

Many kisses to Delayne for the photos.

A sweet beach afternoon with Sam and Rowan..

Led to the creation of a bizarre articulated sand worm that Rowan says looks like a Pokemon-eeep!

Then the tide came whizzing in and we had to abandon the worm to the inexorable fate of all sand creations as we retreated to a more expansive part of the beach. Soon, the lovely miss Rita joined us and I made her a troll foot and built a small crowd of little rock people watching the multitude of parasailors leaping in and out of the water, with varying degrees of skill.

By and by, to my delight, Delayne made it into town(after much harrassment at customs-forgetting his passport didn’t help, but they never can resist f—ing with his irrepressible inner coyote) and restored the kidz swiftly drooping spirits with delicious sparkly beverages.

A brilliant launching point for a scrumptious week.

Pics in the usual location.