Today I made bread from scratch.

Yesterday, mushrooms popped up in our front yard. They are still there today.

Tonight, Gavin roasted coffee beans.

Here are roasted and unroasted beans together on a plate:

Each pile has the same number of beans. The beans get bigger when you roast them.

Gavin and I went to a wedding last weekend.

The dress code was black tie.

We got all dressed up. I like black tie weddings.

On Halloween, we dressed up as two pieces of toast.

We went out to West Hollywood with friends. I haven’t asked them yet if I can blog their pictures, but here is another cute photo of Gavin as a piece of toast.

Proposition 8 was running around scaring people.

We saw Marvin the Martian,

a whoopie cushion and Gumby,

two Trons and the lollipop guild,

James Bond,

a mummy with white platform shoes,

an AT-ST Imperial Walker,

a voting machine,

a Coke bottle,

a person who was not insane,

Trans-Am stewardesses,

a lego man,

a zombie who wished he could eat our friend’s brain (“but I cannot because it is encased in safe plastic”),

a fellow warning that the end was near-ish,

Smurfette,

and the peanut-butter-jelly-time banana. He was walking along side us, singing and dancing and shaking maracas.

He found another banana and asked, “Excuse me, do you know what time it is?” The other banana did know. It was peanut butter jelly time, and they sang about it together.

We also saw Ernie and Bert.

Well hello there!

You know, I think I’ll just head over this direction.

It started with pasta with pesto and broccoli planned for dinner on a night when the kids would be eating with us, and it turned into an all green dinner. We used the greenest place settings we had. We drank Gatorade and sparkling apple cider. And for dessert…

…we had green jello in brandy snifters.

(Note: If you’re a family member and you want anythings that’s less than $10, let me know and you can just have it for free. Seriously. Please don’t buy it.)

(Note to the previous note: Family members include people related to me by blood — any amount — or marriage — intact or not, and significant others of people related to me by blood or marriage, and family members of significant others related to me by blood or marriage. Distant cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmothers, sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, great aunts, great uncles, and all the relatives of all of the parents of my stepchildren are all included.)

Did you know that hummingbirds have tongues?

And did you know that they use them when they’re drinking nectar?

Their beaks open slightly and their tongues shoot in and out of their mouths to lap the nectar up.

We saw a bunch of these signs in Woodstock this summer, and about half of them were spray-painted with skirts. More than half of the people directing traffic were women.