Building a Graveyard and Serial Killer Chili

It was another beautiful fall day. Bright blue skies. Sunshine. Cool breeze. Just wonderful -- I could live in a climate like this all year round!

Shawn and the boys let me sleep in until 8:30, which was a big treat. Then Shawn made us breakfast while the boys and I watched "Meet the Robinsons" -- a very cute cartoon about a little genius boy orphan who eventually finds his family. I enjoyed it. It inspired Mazy to get a notepad and start writing down his ideas for inventions.


Next the boys and I went outside to play in the yard while Shawn started his "serial killer chili" -- it's a chili recipe that was created by a serial killer. No joke. Isn't that creepy? He's been wanting to make it for several years, ever since he discovered the recipe, and this year he finally did. It took several hours to prepare, lots of strange ingredients, like sweet relish, mushrooms, ketchup, hickory-smoked salt, fingertips, etc. Just kidding about the fingertips. It did NOT have any beans. Which is just ludicrous. Chili without beans? Shawn added two cans because seriously that's not chili. We ate it for supper tonight. It was good. Very stick-to-your-ribs hearty. We agreed it's not so good that we'd make it again, or maybe just once each October or something.

Anyway, while outside with the boys I decided to weed the front landscaping. Mazy decided to teach himself how to climb a tree. We have a very tall and bushy evergreen next to the house. Before I knew it, he'd climbed up so he was level with the roof! That's when our next door neighbor came home and about had a heart attack when she saw him. I wasn't worried. Like I said, it's a very bushy tree, if he fell the branches would have broken his fall. But I made him come down so she'd stop worrying.

Then I drove the boys to Cambridge to my sister-in-law's house to take her up on an offer for free gourds/pumpkins. They had some volunteer pumpkins cross with gourds this year and gave us about 30 of them. When we got home, Mazy and I decided to build a graveyard in our backyard with these styrofoam headstones Shawn bought on deep clearance several years ago, all our pumpkins and other outdoor Halloween decorations we scrounged up. Mazy did most of the work -- he did a great job.


Let's see, what else happened today? Oh, my cousin Cody and aunt Cindy are up from Mississippi. Cody is going to spend a night with us this week, which means we did a lot of cleaning this afternoon! We have a lot more to go, but at least we got a good start on it. The poor guy will have to sleep in the boys' room, in Mazy's bottom bunk. Hopefully he doesn't mind dinosaurs! Or spider lights. Or a rather loud fan going at night.... He may change his mind about this...

I had to run to the grocery store tonight for ingredients for a ham/cheese breakfast pizza that I'm taking to work tomorrow. It's our United Way kickoff breakfast. I haven't made this recipe before, but it sure looks good. I just pulled it out of the oven. And I made a mini one for Mazy and Bo's breakfast in the morning.

And now I better get some laundry in and finish cleaning up the den. Have a great week everyone!

October 3rd Halloween Fun:

• Loaded pumpkins into the van at Mark and Denise's house.
• Created a graveyard/pumpkin patch in the backyard.
  
• Decorated the front yard with pumpkins.
• Hung spider lights in the boys' room.