this little life of mine

In honour of Halloween, here are a few pictures I took recently at the Atascadero Colony Days. Imagine my surprise when I uploaded these shots to my computer and discovered there were *GHOSTS in them!!! It's like the original residents of Atascadero's Tent City came to visit!

This guy has NO idea there's a ghost sitting in his tent!

A spectral girl overlooks a ghostly graveyard - now a lovely rose garden - located behind the Atascadero Historical Society house.

The blacksmith is oblivious to the sister ghosts watching him work, but I think that fellow in the background noticed them!

And last, but not least, an innocent child's doll is actually a creepy demonic being!!

Cheers! And Happy Haunting!!

*Okay the pictures were really enhanced on picnik.com - the most fun you'll ever have with photographs!

"A Day in the Life" is a fun photo project from Tracy at sh1ft.org where you take a photo each hour for a whole day. Well, I didn't quite get a photo every hour, but I did take a few shots to at least show how most of my day went! Enjoy!

My mom and I started our day with breakfast at Bru Coffeehouse, our favourite coffee shop. We had our usual: 2 16 oz. non-fat lattes (I get mine with no foam as shown) and share 2 muffins. Today we got a gingerbread (on the left) and our favourite the Morning Glory (on the right).

After breakfast, mom and I went to Rite-Aid to get our flu shots. My arm hurt the rest of the day!

When we got home, I headed out to the garden to harvest some bell peppers and tomatoes. We got rid of our squash plants last weekend since they were basically gone. We're still getting lots of tomatoes and peppers, though, so we're going to do our best to keep those plants going as long as possible.

For lunch I made a Betty Crocker Suddenly Salad (the Classic with the Italian-style vinagrette is our fave!), and added some chopped green bell pepper and tomatoes fresh from the garden. It was the perfect side to our leftover roasted chicken.

This afternoon I polished up some of my sterling silver rings which I plan to take to San Francisco and use with my Halloween costume.

I'm getting ready to head to San Francisco to hang out with some amazingly awesome people this coming week. I'm all packed now including bits and pieces for my Halloween costume.

Tonight's dinner was Southwest Meatballs from the October 2011 Clean Eating magazine. I used the rest of the tomates I harvested this afternoon in the dish. It was yummy!

Before bed I decided to go ahead and polish my toes. I love getting pedis (and manis), but with the furlough days, I really can't afford to do them anymore, so I'm on my own. I don't think I did too bad a job at it! The colour is Bastille My Heart from O.P.I.

I finally got around to printing and posting some new photos on my art wall; a few of my faves from my Seattle trip in August. Yeah, I know, I'm a slacker. And also, I kept running out of printer ink. Anyway, here's the first eight pictures I chose to display:

Because I had such a hard time choosing just eight pictures this time, I'm planning to print out some more and display them next month. I have a few more great shots from the Woodland Park Zoo, the Olympic Sculpture Park and a couple nice landscape/mountain/sunset shots.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
•Grab your current read 

•Open to a random page 

•Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page

•BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)

•Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This week I'm reading The Death Cure by James Dashner. It's the final book in The Maze Runner trilogy and I've been SO looking forward to reading it! It's a great series that I highly recommend - it's an interesting and unique concept, has great characters you can really get behind, and lots of exciting action! My teaser this week comes from page 129:

Thomas fought desperately against it, straining to get control of his muscles. But something foreign had taken over his body.

Recently I was very excited to see my little Madrone tree was blooming with dozens of little bell-shaped flowers:

The bees and humming birds really seem to enjoy them, so they must be filed with something yummy and sweet!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

•Grab your current read
•Open to a random page
•Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
•BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
•Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

This week I'm reading House of Dark Shadows by Robert Liparulo. It is supposed to be a creepy horror story, -which fits in perfect with the month of October! - but I bought it in a Christian bookstore, so I'm curious to see how strong the Christian bent is (if there is one), and how well it fits with the whole horror genre. Here's the teasers from page 105:

As they approached the double doors, they heard voices. They looked at each other with wide eyes, looked around for a place to hide.

I had an amazingly successful and mostly fun weekend. If I sound surprised about that, it's because this lovely 3-day weekend was slated to be a "work weekend" wherein my mom and I would get some of our more craptastic chores and hideous repair jobs out of the way. In the end, however, none of it was as bad as we initially thought, and some of it even turned out to be kinda fun! Bring on the bullets:

• I took my car to be smogged and not only did we get in right away, but my little baby passed - Yay!
• We went grocery shopping - usually a crappy chore my mom and I both hate - and happened to hit Albertson's Customber Appriciation Day with included yummy samples throughout the store, coupons,  and free beer and wine tasting.
• We got the furnace/AC filter changed. That might not seem like such a big deal, but the door to the filter has been jammed for several months, and we were afraid we'd just have to break it to get it open to change the filter. However, after trying to pry it open with a screwdriver and wiggling it around a bit, it popped open with little to no damage!
• And finally, we tamed our wild, overgrown backyard!

It's been a VERY long time since I've posted monthly resolutions (as inspired by Kim), but this month I'm going to try them again.  I'm ready, I think, for some positive changes.

1. Put stuff back on eBay. I haven't tried selling anything for a long time, and I still have that dang faux fur I'm trying to get rid of!
2. Organize the closets. Most of what I get rid of will probably end up on eBay. I tend to buy cute, nice things and then never have the guts to wear them in public.
3. Eat clean and work out. I gained probably 20lbs in September due to all the stress and sadness but now that my head's pretty much together, I need to get back on track.
4. Work on outline for NaNoWriMo novel. I'll be using some tips I got from the recent Writers' Conference to help me get the book written this year and frankly I'm really looking forward to it.
5. Do more fun things and break out of our dull routine. While there is a TON of yardwork/housework/nit-picky things to do, my mom and I have vowed we will have more fun! Go to the beach, eat dinner out in the middle of the week, go to wine tastings, art festivals, anything that gets us out of the house, breaks our routine and is fun!

Flying over Mt. Rainier.