Can you believe it’s 6 weeks to Christmas?  And less than 2 until Thanksgiving.  This time of year goes by even faster than the rest of the year.  Maybe that’s why January and February seem to take forever to get through LOL.

I have hardly been taking any pictures. I haven’t had time or just not really interesting. I have been doing a lot of work (even today) and you don’t need pictures of my keyboard!  😀   I just need to get through the next 6 weeks and things will settle down more and I can get back to work on fun projects like the trunks that have been sitting around waiting for me to get to them.

Anyway. Most of the plants have been killed by frost, but my ground mums are still going.  They are flopped over from the heavy wet snow a couple weeks ago, but they still look pretty.

Some places are full-on Christmas already. We were out for breakfast this morning and the coffee shop was all decked out.

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No holiday music yet, though.  I find I don’t even mind this, actually. Thanksgiving and Christmas kind of tie together, unlike summer and pumpkins.

On a most annoying note, I think I going to have to go in for another root canal. I have had a very sensitive tooth for a couple years, but even at the last visit in August, the x-rays looked fine. The dentist had put some kind of barrier film on the tooth to help with sensitivity and it worked pretty well.  Fast forward to last week and I started to get sinus pain, which I first attributed to rain coming, but then it moved into my mouth as well and I cannot even chew on that side of my mouth because of pain in the tooth. I tried calling my dentist on Friday, but they were closed for the holiday.  I was considering going to the urgent care because of how much it hurt, but with warm compresses it’s a lot better. It only hurts now when my teeth click together or if I accidentally chew on that side.  Hopefully I can get a fast appointment on Monday to get the process rolling. I *just* finished off the payments on my last root canal in February and now I look forward to another $1500 dental bill. Boo.

On a good note, there has been more biking!  It was in the low 50s today, so we got on the bikes for a nice ride.

Bundled up, but it any late season ride is a good one.

Thanks for the comments on yesterday’s post. Everyone was very nice agreeing or not, and I’m glad that if you dissented that you felt comfortable enough here to do that. Too bad Washington can’t act that way.  We certainly have a lot to do.

There has been biking in November still! I was out on Tuesday with a ride.

Not too shabby.

I’ve been doing pretty good on the maintain thing through Halloween. I got rid of that pound I gained in Ireland and have been maintaining. It’s a little harder at this time of year and I have to really check myself sometimes. Candy corn snacking and all that. The last of the post Halloween sale candy corn is in the house, but will soon be gone LOL.  It’s sometimes being the adult and saying, “Well, I really want some eggnog, but I did have candy corn today and that was my choice”. Not that I couldn’t have the nog if I really wanted it, but realizing I don’t need to have it. Plus nog will be around through Christmas.

I realize I forgot to update the tea! We had the first Victorian tea at Chapman House (where I volunteer). It was pretty successful. When we did the tea run through, it was the day after we got back from Ireland. I could only attend the prep part of the practice tea because I was swamped with work, so I missed the actual tea part. Well, there was an open spot at the “real” tea and the coordinator put my name on a placecard to have a seat at the table since I missed the other tea. That was so nice!

I was part of the food crew. Because the museum doesn’t have a commercial kitchen, we had to use a  nearby church kitchen to prepare some of the food there and bring it back to the museum. I was part of that detail making the chicken salad sandwiches and egg salad cups.  Then I got back just in time for the presentation.

This is the dining room before decoration and lengthening the table:

The tea begins with the education director talking about what Victorian women had to wear for clothing. Did you know their winter clothes could weigh up to 40 pounds? That was one of the reasons for the corset – to help you back support the weight of the clothes.  No wonder Victorian women fainted all the time 😀

We all got to wear period hats to the tea as well:

It’s shocking to see me in a hat and not a helmet, isn’t it? Then to the dining room.

I didn’t get as many pictures as I would have liked because I had to get in to the presentation and the table wasn’t all the way set up.

Delicious scones donated by a local bakery.

The tea went quite smoothly and we learned about what to do better for the next tea in December. The attendees seemed to really enjoy it.  I will make sure to get pictures of the next tea table setting since it will be set up for Victorian Scottish Christmas.

I don’t really like to be political on the blog, but oh well.  We’ve done it America, for better or worse. Or half of America did it. Half did not. Hate won this election. On both sides. Whether it was hate for Hillary, hate for Obamacare, hate for Trump, hate of a democrat nominating a supreme court justice, hate of immigrants, hate of gun control, hate of POC… the list goes on.  And that is what bothers me more than Trump actually being president. This bed of hatred is now what we must lie in and I for one don’t want to.

The seedy underbelly of America was exposed and spilled itself into the rhetoric.  This has now encouraged the worst of the worst to go ahead and spout what they want now. Even David Duke, white supremacist bag of garbage, said this:

This is one of the most exciting nights of my life -> make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump

That should scare you. That should scare Trump as well. Let’s hope he has the guts to address the issue. The country is basically  still split down the middle and healing from that may never take place.  What kind of America do we have when some of our fellow Americans are now afraid to live here because of who they are?

The right says that now we know how they felt when Obama was elected, but no matter how much you dislike him or his policies, Obama is a decent human being. Back in the Bush/Gore election, I was terribly disappointed, but I didn’t think Bush was a bad human being. This time? Well, there is enough audio and video out there that speaks for itself.

I think Van Jones said it best:

And Donald Trump has a responsibility tonight to come out and reassure people that he is going to be the president of all the people he insulted, and offended, and brushed aside, yeah. When you say you want to take your country back, you got a lot of people who feel they’re not represented well either. But we don’t want to feel that someone has been elected by throwing away some of us to appeal more deeply to others.

But this is more than politics. This is about human beings. We as Americans need to prove that we are better than this. We are. We have to be. No matter who you voted for, call out hate on the carpet when you see it. Hate should not be a presidential platform. You need to be able to look everyone in the eye and say “We all are equal. You matter” I think we kind of said the opposite to half the country.

I truly hope Trump is not the man he seems to be. I truly, truly hope that.  I so badly want this to be okay. Maybe he won’t revert to the form we saw on the campaign trail. Maybe he will make good changes. Am I optimistic? Nope.  I can only try to make my corner of the world full of kindness and acceptance and equality. If everyone does the same, maybe there is hope.

Now, better get all my doctor appointments in before January before we lose our health insurance…

I had a great show on Saturday!  That was really nice after that terrible one in September. The vibe was great. Everyone was really friendly and in a good mood.

I had been working on a new display and I like how it came out and looks a lot more organized.

I was in a corner spot, so this actually wraps around the other side of the table as well.

It was really nice that this was on Saturday only and the crew there helped everyone load and unload their vehicles, which was amazing.

Big sellers?  Lemongrass, again. Every time. Plus pine and Honeysuckle, the last one being a surprise to me.

It was good to have a Sunday off. Well, mostly off. I worked for a couple hours to try to get some stuff caught up so Monday won’t be hellaciously busy.  I did try a fun recipe today. Okay, not really a recipe, but a technique.  I’ve been wanted to make dulce de leche using condensed sweetened milk, but doing it in a crockpot takes 8-12 hours.  Even with transferring the milk to mason jars so you can see it, I was still a little concerned about the jars bursting.  Then I found this recipe from Dave Leibovitz. It calls for baking the milk in the oven to caramelize!

All you need is a can of sweetened condensed milk (I used low fat), a pie plate and a baking pan with a high lip.

Preheat the oven to 425 F.  Pour the milk into the pie pan. Add water to come up about half way up the side of the pie plate. This is why you need a high lipped pan.

Wrap the top in foil. It works best to take the pie plate out and put the foil on. Or wait and add the water after you wrap the top. I did neither and was messing in the water trying to put the foil on LOL.

Into the oven and bake for 1-1/4 hours. That is according to Mr. Leibovitz. It took mine almost 2 hours. I think maybe that was because I used low fat milk?  Anyway, check it out!

The top is messy because I poked at it with a spatula.  Once it cooled a bit, I whisked it smooth and it got a little more ‘loose’:

Yum!  It’s really tasty. I could see putting this on some oatmeal.  We did drizzle a little on top of our lattes in the afternoon.  Delicious!

Is the time change kicking anyone else’s butt?  I have been having some insomnia issues for the last week. My insomnia is early waking. I fall asleep really easily, but I wake up too early, which has made me a little crabby today. I was up at 5:30 and I’ve just been really tired for the last week.  You would think I would wake up later with the time change, but no.

I have to stay up tonight, though. The Broncos are on Sunday night!  Please, please no overtime.  It would be nice if they put the game away in the third quarter and I could just go to sleep.

Speaking of someone who is awake, I put this on Facebook, but Pixie is so cute I will share it here.

All those extra toes!  I can’t believe she is 9 years old.

Anyway, time for the game. Go Broncos!

November already. Goodness! Candy corn season is over now. At least until the after Halloween sale stuff is gone.  It’s funny how much I love candy corn, but I really don’t want it at any other time of year.  Now it’s eggnog time.

We had about 14 kids or so for Halloween. Not a ton, but actually more than last year. I’m not sure where the kids go to trick or treat as far as the best neighborhoods around here.  Guess it’s not ours 😀

I think most of America was up late last night to watch the World Series.  I couldn’t stay up, but John did. Congrats to the Cubbies. With it going into extra innings for game 7 and a rain delay, people certainly got their money’s worth on this series as far as suspense goes.

I feel like I have been neglecting the blog a bit. It’s just been busy and it’s really my same old routine.  Biking season is nearing an end. Each time we go out, it could be the last time for the season.  I did get a chance to go out the other day as it was in the 50s. I like to ride earlier in the day, so it was nice to have doable temps in the morning.

I was only wearing a long sleeve shirt and 2 jackets LOL!  I can walk outside in a lot lower temps than I can bike… or willing to bike that is. 40 is about my threshold for cycling. You can only put on so many layers and still pedal.

This weekend starts the fall shows in earnest.  I have a lot of stock ready to go. Boxes and boxes of soap.

Here’s hoping I sell a lot.  You just never know. The weather looks decent for Saturday, so that’s good.  The nice thing about the show this Saturday is that I only have to go a little over a mile to get there. Nice and close to home, unlike the next one which is an hour away.

Welcome in November, hope you stay around longer than October did!

We were looking for a group outing this weekend and ended up choosing a corn maze.  We did one about 5 years ago and had a good time. This year we went to Schuyler Farms to try theirs.

It’s amazing to me how big and complex the mazes are.  This is an aerial view of our maze:

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Our welcoming host:

Come on in!

There was a phone number on our tickets to call if you got lost.  We split into 2 groups, the teens and the adults.  Of course, the girls finished before we did even though we ran into them a couple times.

Lots of twists and turns. We just kept going in circles over and over again coming up to this bridge.

It was no help to be up here because you couldn’t see the paths LOL!

Wait up!

This maze is open at night and is a haunted maze. There are some props and things around the maze.

John going into the slaugherhouse:

Uh oh:

We entered.

Rickety bridge:

Once we got through the first part, the rest of the maze went a lot faster and we finally made it out!

We ended up walking 2-1/2 miles through the maze! That was a lot of walking.  It was really fun. We need to do them every year.

Schuyler Farms has other things to do along with the maze. You can pan for gems:

Visit the petting zoo:

Hey lady, where is the food???

And the sweetest young cow:

Isn’t it the cutest thing?? Eeeee!

You can pick up pumpkins and gourds as well.

It was a great day. Really windy, but at least all the rain was gone from Saturday.

Until next year corn maze!

Wednesdays are my weigh-in days. I was not sure what the scale would say after a week in Ireland eating whatever – and a lot of it. I don’t really care too much about any weight gain from vacations because it’s worth it.  😀 Normally I gain a fair amount of weight after vacations and I would have been happy with anything under a 5 pound gain, but I was pleasantly surprised to see only a 1 pound gain!

I’m sure some of that is because there was a lot of walking, but John was thinking maybe the food was just less processed over there (or at least where we were eating).  Breakfast for me all week included porridge, believe it or not.

Some days I had eggs as well. I had no interest in the full Irish breakfast of bacon, ham, sausage, baked beans and whatever else.  My breakfasts were much bigger than normal and I swear the B&B hosts were not comfortable with what we ate (John being a vegetarian) thinking it wasn’t enough. LOL Along with the oats, there was brown bread and toast with butter and jam, plus eggs, fruit, yogurt and cereal to choose from. A much, much bigger breakfast than at home, and a lot of butter LOL. I have to say that I really enjoyed the Irish butter and I might be suckered in to buying the Kerrygold brand here.

We walked a lot, too.  Here are the mile breakdowns each day

9/24 (travel day)  1.5 miles

9/25 – 6.5 miles

9/26 – 7.7 miles

9/27 – 7.1 miles

9/28 (a rainy blustery day) 3.5 miles

9/29 – 9.1 miles (we were really tired that day LOL )

9/30 – 8.8 miles

10/1 – 5.5 miles

10/2 (travel day) 1.6 miles

That’s a lot of walking.

We had dessert every day and sometimes another sweet. Ireland does great sweet things!

The above was a napoleon type of dessert with a coffee frosting, and yes, it was as amazing as it looks!

My focus now is to lose the 1 pound and then not gain weight for the fall and holidays. I love eating all the fall foods, so this will be a challenge. I can have things, just not every day.

Still working on pictures. I took so many!

Just a quick post from Ireland! Normally this would be a What’s Blooming post, but I’m typing this from my phone, so this is it ?

John and I are celebrating 20 years here in Ireland. It’s been a great trip and ending all too soon. Expect lots of blog posts about it in the near future. A couple teasers:

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It’s that time of year!  I love the balloons. The festival is always so dependent on good weather. Some years there have been no flights, some years all 5 flights happen.

The festival opened on Thursday with a small launch in Crandall Park. We can walk there from our house. It’s about a mile or so, which is great because we don’t have to deal with traffic and parking! Score!  It was a little breezy and we were thinking the balloons weren’t going to go and then they started.

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It’s neat to watch the process close up.

We saw one balloon actually get a burn in the canvas as it was inflating. There was a big hole in it, so that balloon couldn’t fly (obviously). Makes me wonder if the crowd didn’t get too close.

Jurassic Journey. I don’t know what that is. I could look up the website, but I’m feeling a little lazy 😀

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You really can get close to the balloons at they inflate. It’s amazing how they let you be so close.

You’re not supposed to touch the balloons when they are inflating, but kids tend to want to run up and touch them.

Adults, too, I guess.

I love the colors in this one.

My favorite shot of the day. Perfect placement for this balloon to go directly overhead and we could see straight through to the top.

Isn’t that cool?

I was glad to get a chance to catch them. The balloons didn’t fly on Friday and Thursday was the only other night we could go.

Gorgeous evening all around!

Our fall temperatures didn’t last too long. Back to the 80s again with humidity. Ick.  I think Ireland might feel like a bit of a shocker with coolness if these temps don’t go down some.

When it was chillier, I made some pumpkin oat bran. Also to start using up open stuff in the fridge 😀

I just cook the canned pumpkin right with the oat bran and whisk in some egg whites. Topped with a bit of butter, dried cranberries and 1 tablespoon of maple syrup (the real stuff).  Definitely seems like a fall breakfast even if the weather isn’t.

I had to get my new iPhone replaced already. I just got it in June but one of the microphones broke in it.  If I took a video with the front facing camera, the sound only came out as static. I was bummed because I recorded a bit of the Divas the other night and it was just static.  It used to work. The weird thing? If I took a video with the rear facing camera, the sound worked.  So after forever on the phone trying to prove it wasn’t software related, I got them to issue me a replacement phone under warranty.  Then I had to spend time backing up and reinstalling on the new phone, but all appears well and good now 😀

Anyway, back to the title of today’s post. Today was eye appointment day.  It was the full shebang, too, with dilation and pictures of my retina. I don’t know if any of you find the human body fascinating, but I do.  John doesn’t LOL.  I have a bit of scar tissue on the back of my retina and today the doctor took comparison pictures to make sure it hasn’t changed since it is close to my macula.  Here is my eye:

Isn’t that a cool picture?  That white stuff is the scar tissue. She said it could have been some infection as a kid or whatever. No way to really tell what created it, but it’s in both eyes.  It doesn’t require anything other than periodic pictures to make sure it isn’t changing.

I had only a bit of vision change in one eye and I do need reading glasses (which I knew anyway and already bought a pair).  Ah, aging…