HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Don't be scared...
...it's just Mason wearing a sheet!

Mason called me at noon today to tell me that he had been invited to a Halloween party and needed a costume. We went to Wal-Mart after school, but the costume section had been cleaned out. We had to come up with something on our own. Mason decided that being a ghost would be cheap and easy. The sheet cost us less than $6!

His friends thought it was a great costume. He said a lot of the adults commented that he looked like the kids from the Charlie Brown Halloween special. Fortunately, he didn't get any rocks when he went trick-or-treating!

The packaging for Morgan's costume said that it was a "Zombie Groom." We were a bit confused by the "zombie" part. He really enjoyed wearing the top hat. We bought the cane at the drug store.

Mitchell always goes for the creepy costumes!!

The weather was absolutely amazing tonight. There were a ton of people out and about. I can't believe how much candy the boys brought home. It's going to take them forever to eat it all!

Pumpkin Carving 2007

Well, we did the annual pumpkin carving thing. Mitchell, Kaye, and Morgan carved these tonight. A good time was had by all.

Kaye went with the boys to get the pumpkins the other day. Mitchell used the patented Gregorian Drill Method.

He calls it, "Random Holes." That's because...well, never mind.
Kaye did one. Hers is kind of small. This is the part she likes the most, mucking out the internals. She says that it reminds her of what it feels like when she is ripping out the internals of a small animal that is still alive.

I don't usually let her handle knives, but tonight was an exception. She kept getting confused, though, and calling the pumpkin Greg.
And she would stab it over and over and over...It was kind of disturbing. I wonder if it means anything... I'm sure you noticed, by the way, that her little gray helper is not around. He quickly figured out that there was no meat, no cheese, and no prospects for either. He went off to take a nap.
Mitchell really got into the drilling. He was using two different sized spade bits and a small auger bit.

You really have to concentrate...
He handles the drill well, though.
Morgan opted for a large, round pumpkin.

He likes the mucking out part as much as Kaye does.

Here is Morgan cutting out his pumpkin's traditional-style face.
A lop-sided grin. The pumpkin, too.
Here is a video of Kaye carving.

My New Look

No more tinsel teeth! My braces were taken off today.

Here's the self portrait that I took right after I got home:
And the picture that Greg took of me this evening:

My retainers are weird! They glow in the dark!!

latest in our lives

Here are a few images of the last couple of weeks.

The new woodstove is here

This is the woodstove that we have been living with for the past 6 winters. It is rated at 40,000 Btu/hr and probably had an efficiency rating of less than 50. It was also a very old (poor) design. The flue colgged up early in the winter, even though we had it cleaned each fall. In addition, its blower (takes air from the house and blows it around the outside of the firebox and back into the room) moved very little air and made a terrible racket.

This is the new stove. 73,800 Btu/hr, 71% efficient. The blower moves huge amounts of air and is whisper quiet.

This will run pretty much all winter to minimize the amount of time that the heating system (a natural gas fired boiler that runs a 3-zone baseboard heater system throughout the house) is on. This is the new tripple-wall chimney sleeve that is now requied by local building code for wodstove inserts. A woodstove produces much hotter flue gases than a fireplace. This is to minimize the probablility of a chimney fire. They were still working on it when this pic was taken. So, before you say anything, Mark, it doesn't stay like this.
This is the old liner that came out.