Woohoo! We’ve made it through 100 days without Troy, and Troy’s made it through 100 days of deployment. I know, we should have made a fuss over Day 90 because that’s allegedly the halfway point, but Troy’s homecoming date is up in the air, so who knows.

It seemed right to make a fuss about 100 days, though, because, c’mon, A HUNDRED DAYS! Look at all those photos. We’ve actually managed to take a picture every day, more or less. I only had to fudge once.

Here’s to 100 days down!

View the photoset 180 photos for Troy on Flickr, or view the mosaic large.

There are some really nice people on the internet. Kimberly from Tokyo Pen Shop saw that I mentioned buying pens from them in my last post, and she also saw my friend Bekah’s comment that she would love to try the pens but wasn’t that keen on paying shipping, and left a comment herself with a free shipping code for my readers! So now’s your chance, if you want to try the pens I mentioned (or you want to buy a Christmas gift for the pen-lover in your life) just enter the code ACTUALLYFREESHIPPING when you check out. The code expires November 14th, 2009.

On behalf of me and my readers, thanks, Kimberly!

I’ve been on a kick of painting these round little mugs lately, they feel really nice to hold. This one is in my Etsy shop for anyone who wants it.

This one, I painted for my friend Jen as a birthday gift.

Annalie and I were sitting outside on the patio today and Katy was sitting at the door, yowling to be let out. Poor cat. She really wants to be an outdoor cat, but when we got her from a shelter in Phoenix she was already declawed, so we don’t feel right letting her outdoors.

Took our Day 98 photo for Troy while we were out there. I keep accidentally taking these off-center self-portraits. I kinda like them.

Not long ago, Brenda introduced me to her favorite pen, the Uniball Signo DX 0.38mm. They’re Japanese gel pens with a really nice stroke and a fine-but-not-too-fine line, and they are awesome. Brenda had only ever been able to find them at a local Japanese bookstore for about $4 apiece. Then we found the fabulous Tokyo Pen Shop, where they sell our favorite pens for half the price we’d been paying at the Japanese bookstore.

We ordered a dozen to get free shipping, and then I noticed they had an offer on the homepage for a free orange pen if you ordered a certain amount of merchandise, which we had. So I wrote a quick email explaining that my friend and I loved the Uniball Signo DX pens, and we’d love a free orange one. I got a really nice email back from one of the website’s owners, saying that she probably would have included that brand, since that was all we’d ordered, but that since I’d written now she knew to include two orange pens. How cool is that!? I will definitely be patronizing their shop again.

More flower scarves! I keep making these because people keep asking me to crochet them. Whenever I start another one I groan a little bit because in my head these are a pain to make, but once I get started I remember, oh right, these are actually pretty fun!

I’ve been thinking about writing up a pattern for a flower scarf and putting it in my Etsy shop, along with the spiral squares and snowball crochet patterns. It wouldn’t be exactly the same as the scarves I make because I make up the patterns for the flowers as I go along, but it would be similar. What do you guys think, should I write up that pattern? Would you buy it for a couple of bucks? (Oh, and these particular scarves are in my shop waiting for OneScrappyGal to go buy them.)

I got a pretty exciting present earlier this week: a new lens for my D40! (Pardon me while I geek out just a little bit.) I’d been wanting a lens with a better zoom, so when my friend Joe (my camera teacher) saw a good deal on a 55-200mm VR lens he told Troy about it. Troy bought it for me, and told me he’d bought me a present that would be coming in the mail, but he didn’t tell me what it was. I truly had no clue this is what he was sending me. I might have actually squealed a bit when I opened the box. Today Annalie and I went to the park, where I tried the new lens out.

It’s much bigger than my other two lenses, but it’s not much heavier thanks to being made of plastic. It’s easy to use, thanks to the autofocus.

I love my new lens! Yay! Thank you so much, guys, for your conspiracy in making me a better photographer. Or at least an amateur with fun photography toys.

This park has a new, modern, colorful playground with deep mulch all around it. Annalie went down one of the plastic slides and then made a beeline for the 30-year-old slide and monkey bars sitting in hard-packed dirt.

These mystery fruits (nuts? seeds?) were on a tree in the park. They were about the size of walnut, maybe a little smaller. I have no idea what they are, but they’re a really pretty shade of reddish-orange.

This photo pretty much sums up Annalie’s attitude about the tall slide. It also makes me laugh.

Love that light, and the girl. And my pens and my new lens. To sum up, we’re all good around here, good and happy.

Ooops, I meant to post this earlier today when I uploaded it to Flickr. My mom’s birthday was yesterday, November 4th. When I was five years old, in 1980, my mom’s birthday happened to be on Election Day. It was a presidential election year, so of course the elections were a big deal and much-talked-about on the news. The next time it was an election year, I was really confused about why the elections weren’t held on November 4th, because I was certain my mom’s birthday was Election Day. Eventually I figured the whole Tuesday-after-the-first-Monday-in-November thing out, of course, but I still chuckle about that misunderstanding every year on my mom’s birthday and every Election Day.

We hope you had a great day, Mom! No confusion or misunderstanding about that.

This was the plan for Halloween weekend: on Friday, Brenda and Bug would arrive just before lunchtime. Jen would arrive sometime around lunch for her one-day-late birthday celebration with us. We’d do some fun crafty things with the kids, carve pumpkins, and then my mom would watch Annalie and Bug while Jen and Brenda and I went to paint some pottery. We’d have a delicious dinner, with some kind of yummy dessert in Jen’s honor. After we waved Jen on her way home, we’d put the kids to bed and then Brenda and my mom and I would hang out with our laptops and watch Mad Men and Castle.

On Saturday, Brenda’s mom Sue, sister-in-law Heather, and nieces Rapunzel and SuperChic were going to arrive around noon. We’d make a fun Halloween lunch of mummy hot dogs and roasted garlic-rosemary potatoes and cucumbers. We’d eat late, so the kids wouldn’t be too hungry when we went trick-or-treating at the mall right at dinnertime. Then we’d come back home and let the kids eat candy while we hung out in the front yard with the gate open and handed out candy to any trick-or-treaters who passed by. Maybe we’d watch a Halloween movie before bedtime, and have popcorn for dinner.

On Sunday morning, I’d make aebleskivers for breakfast before we attempted to get to church. If no one was in a hurry to leave, maybe we’d go paint pottery again, and take the kids this time. It would be a busy but fun-filled weekend.

Those were our plans. Now would you like to hear what actually happened?

Friday morning, I got an email from Jen telling me that she wasn’t going to be able to come. Her oldest daughter had been having a rough week at school, so Jen wanted to go to her daughter’s class Halloween party as a surprise. Also. Jen’s mom had been admitted to the hospital with what was probably H1N1, and Jen wanted to be there in case her mom and dad needed her. (Update: Jen’s mom is out of the hospital now, and on the mend. Yay!) Of course I understood why she wasn’t coming, and I told her they would all be in our thoughts and prayers, but I was bummed. It’s been a while since I’ve seen Jen and I was really looking forward to it. At least everyone else was still coming.

Brenda and Bug arrived as scheduled, bearing pumpkins, decorations, craft supplies, and bad news: no one else was coming. Brenda had talked to her mom on the drive down, and what with Brenda’s brother being off work recently because of health problems, and all the doctor’s visits and tests and things, everyone was feeling that end-of-the-month budget crunch. They just didn’t feel right spending the money to come down for a visit. Gas alone for a round-trip visit from the Sticks to my house is probably $60 or more, not to mention all the pottery-painting, trips to Starbucks, etc. So they did the responsible thing and stayed home. They did get to go to a super-fun Halloween dinner and trick-or-treating event at Brenda’s grandpa’s retirement home, so it’s not like they were sitting around, crying into their coffee. But we missed them.

After lunch, we ran some errands and then went back home where the kids made some Halloween decorations with construction paper and scissors. Then they dragged many of Annalie’s stuffed animals outside, arranged them all over the front yard, and played Zoo for the better part of the afternoon. We dug out our Halloween lights that are colored like candy corn and put those up over the gate. Brenda got some work done and designed a Christmas card (coming soon to her Etsy shop!) while I started making gingerbread cookies.

I hadn’t planned on making gingerbread cookies, but I wanted to send a little something to Jen in a birthday care package, and Brenda said, “You know what sounds good? Gingerbread cookies. We could use a pumpkin cookie cutter and draw faces on them with icing,” which was all the encouragement I needed.

Only it turned out I don’t actually own a pumpkin cookie cutter. (Gift idea, in case any family members reading this need one: cookie cutters for holidays other than Christmas & Valentine’s Day!) I stuck the dough in the fridge to chill, which it needed to do anyway, and figured we’d stop at Target that evening when we went out to paint pottery and pick one up, but we never did find one.

While we were painting pottery that night after the kids had gone to bed, Brenda started to get a stomachache. That was a bit worrying, since the week before when she’d been visiting her family in the Sticks, everyone was sick. Brenda had been sick a few days before that with what she thought at the time was food poisoning, but when everyone else got sick she thought maybe she’d had a stomach virus and had passed it along to her family. But when she started to feel queasy Friday night she realized that what she’d had before probably was food poisoning, and now she was getting the stomach virus. That night Brenda was up half the night, er, emptying her stomach contents.

In the morning (Halloween morning!) she apologized for coming to our house when she was sick. I reminded her that the very first time we met and I stayed at her house, I had such a bad cold that I drank half her tea, used an entire box of tissues, and had such a bad sore throat I could barely talk. Also, I was glad she was at our house where Bug had Annalie to play with and other grown-ups to feed her and watch her, so Brenda could rest if she needed to. And she did spend much of the morning resting in bed. A night of running back and forth to the bathroom to throw up will do that to a body.

The rest of us were fine, so we went about our day. I got coffee going and made pumpkin muffins for breakfast, substituting pumpkin pie spice for the cinnamon, so the whole house smelled like pumpkin pie all day, which was lovely.

I prepped the teeny tiny potatoes with a delicious mustard-garlic-rosemary mixture, and cut the hot dogs in half and wrapped them with strips of refrigerated croissant dough (not even I make that from scratch). Brenda started feeling a bit better, so she got the pumpkin-carving started. Annalie and Bug chose their designs (Hello Kitty and a ninja) and helped scoop the guts and seeds out of the pumpkins, cheerfully hollering about how gross it all was. I collected all the seeds so I could roast them because YUM.

I roasted two batches, one savory and one sweet. The sweet batch I left in the oven for about 30 seconds too long and half the pan got burned to a crisp. I was quite annoyed about that, but as it turned out I preferred the savory seeds to the sweet ones anyway. And the smoke alarm didn’t even wake Bug up from her nap.

Eventually we did have to wake Bug up so we could eat. Poor Brenda could still barely look at food, even though she was done with the worst of her illness. We ate the croissant-wrapped hot dogs (tasty) and the roasted garlic-rosemary teeny-tiny potatoes (delicious) and cucumbers sliced into spears (handy). Once the kitchen was cleaned up, it was time to get into costumes, which was pretty much all Annalie and Bug had been wanting to do all day long.

None of us had ever been trick-or-treating at a mall before, so we didn’t really know what to expect. We parked in our usual place, walked through a department store, and entered the mall to see hundreds of kids and adults, most of them in costume, strolling up and down and going in and out of shops. It was crazy, and much busier than I’ve ever seen our little mall. But it wasn’t too crazy. We didn’t have trouble keeping track of each other or have to fight our way through the crowds or anything like that. The only times there were big crowds were when we had to go inside a store to get candy. Most of the shops had someone stationed right at the entrance or even just outside the door with their candy, but I guess some of them were shorthanded.

The best part about mall trick-or-treating, by far, was that we got to see so many cool costumes! There are some creative people out there, and many of them were in that mall on Halloween afternoon. It was nice to trick-or-treat while it was still light out, too, and walking around the mall was easier than walking up and down dozens of driveways. We did miss getting to hear all the, “Oh, aren’t you guys cute! Look at the rockstar and the witch!” commentary that we would have heard if we’d been trick-or-treating in a neighborhood, though. A few of the people handing out candy were definitely into the spirit of fun, with costumes on and smiling and saying a word to each child, but most of them were clearly just doing their jobs, earning their paychecks, plopping candy into bags and buckets as quickly as they could.

It took us about 45 minutes to get through the whole mall, and by then Brenda was beat and needed to sit down. We went to the quiet food court and sat by the fountain for a while. Bug and Annalie each chose a blue lollipop from their pumpkins, which made it easier to get them to pose for a few photos.

Back at home, I popped popcorn and brought it outside for Annalie and Bug to snack on. Mostly they ignored the popcorn and just ran around in the grass, pausing occasionally to eat a Tootsie Roll or mini KitKat. Neither of them really ate much candy though. I don’t think either of them had more than four or five pieces. Then Annalie asked if she could have some carrots and broccoli. You know, the traditional Halloween veggies & dip.

No, I’m not kidding. My kid is weird, but in an awesome way. For the record, I have no idea why she loves fruit and vegetables so much. I mean, I love them, but it took me 20 years to come around on that issue. When I was Annalie’s age I wouldn’t have touched broccoli with a ten-foot pole.

We had the gate open and candy and pretzels to hand out, but not many trick-or-treaters came by. I really wasn’t too surprised about that, though. We live on a rather busy street, even though it’s a residential area, and our sidewalk is right there by the street, with a busy intersection right in front of our house. Once it got dark, we blew out all the candles and everyone went inside to get ready for bed.

*WARNING, there is talk of vomiting ahead, if you have a weak stomach read with caution! I’ll try not to be too graphic.*

Bug started complaining of a tummyache around the time she went to bed, and cried and cried about it for a good half-hour. Then she threw up. While I was throwing sheets and towels into the washer Brenda called Toby and he wanted her to take Bug to the ER just to be on the safe side. So off we went to the hospital near our house. (Brenda goes into detail about the ER visit in the second half of her post about Halloween, so I won’t go into all of that here; you can just click over and read her post if you want.)

It was a bit scary how Bug wouldn’t stop crying and clutching her stomach, but in the end it turned out that she just had really bad gas. Luckily after Bug was triaged, we only had to wait in the ER waiting room for a couple of hours, and she was asleep for most of that. When she woke up she farted a couple of times and then said, “Oh! My tummy feels all better now!” It was funny of course, but mostly it was such a relief to see her calm and smiling. We went back home where Bug and Brenda went to straight to bed and fell asleep.

That’s when things got really nuts. Annalie woke up around midnight and raced to the bathroom just in time to throw up everything she’d eaten that evening. I was upstairs in the living room, so my mom—who usually sleeps with Annalie in her room when she’s here—took care of the worst of it. I didn’t even realize it was going on till I heard my mom talking. I went downstairs and helped get Annalie settled back in bed with a bowl by the side of the bed. I asked her if she wanted me to stay, but Annalie was just fine with Gramaw. I went back upstairs to my crocheting…and before long I heard Annalie throwing up again. Poor kid.

It was a long night for the three of us. We had to change the bedding once when Annalie didn’t quite make it to the bathroom, and later my mom and Annalie came upstairs to my room because Annalie threw up in bed again and my mom didn’t feel like changing sheets a second time in the middle of the night. In the morning Annalie seemed to be over the worst part, but she had a slight fever and spent the day on the couch, bowl nearby just in case, nibbling occasionally on a Saltine and taking little sips of water and fruit juice.

When Brenda got up on Sunday morning and realized that Annalie had been puking too, she felt awful and apologized again. But of course we didn’t blame her! She thought she was over all sickness when she came to visit. The good thing is that by Sunday morning Brenda felt 100% better, so we knew Annalie probably wouldn’t be sick long, and she wasn’t. By Sunday night Annalie was sitting up, telling us silly jokes. Monday she was even better.

Even though my mom and I were both sleeping with Annalie while she was sick, we were also both washing our hands till they were raw, so we wouldn’t get sick too. Just to be on the safe side, Annalie and I are on a self-imposed quarantine for a few days. No playdates or hanging out at the park for us this week, but that’s okay. We’ve been so busy this month and have been sick so many times, a few days of staying home will be good. My mom flew home Monday, a little nervous that the stomach virus would hit her while she was on a plane, but she got home without incident. And Brenda told me that if I get sick, I should call her and they’ll come down and help with Annalie since they’ve already had this particular bug, which is quite generous of her. I have great friends!

You know what’s funny, though? Even though two-thirds of our guests couldn’t make it, and Brenda got sick and couldn’t do all the fun crafts she had planned, and we made a Halloween-night visit to the ER and spent the rest of the night caring for a miserably sick kid, it was a pretty good weekend. I know, that sounds crazy! But looking back on the weekend I can’t seem to focus on all the bad stuff. It all seems hazy and unimportant.

The fun stuff is what I remember. We decorated the yard, we carved pumpkins and roasted seeds, I made a fun Halloween lunch and yummy pumpkin muffins, we made gingerbread cookies and decorated them, we trick-or-treated at the mall, we sat outside and enjoyed the almost-full moon, we painted pottery twice (we went back with Bug on Sunday afternoon to finish what we didn’t finish Friday), we put together a care package for a friend…and everyone who got sick was quickly well again. It wasn’t the weekend we thought we were going to have, but that’s okay. There were many good moments that will become good memories. And the rest of it makes a heckuva story.

That was a doozy of a weekend. I’ve been sitting here for two hours watching TV, trying unsuccessfully to convince myself to edit and upload photos and write a post about everything. By the time I get around to writing about it you’ll all have moved on to Thanksgiving and you’ll roll your eyes at me and tell me that Halloween was SO last month. I figure a photo and a quick summary will have to do till I feel like recounting all the crazy details. To sum up: two-thirds of the people who were planning to come visit for the weekend didn’t make it, Brenda got sick the night before Halloween, trick-or-treating at the mall is kind of insane, Bug got sick Halloween night and we took her to the ER (she’s completely and totally fine, full explanation coming in a future post), and Annalie woke up around midnight and every hour or so the rest of the night to puke. So my mom and I traded that extra hour of sleep for an extra hour of puke and doing multiple loads of laundry.

Aside from all those things, we carved pumpkins, we baked cookies and muffins, we painted pottery, we saw lots of cool costumes at the mall. All things considered, it was actually a good weekend…but I’m still glad it’s over. Now I’m just praying I don’t get whatever stomach bug everyone else had. At least Annalie was feeling much better by bedtime tonight.

How was YOUR Halloween?

When we were in Virginia Beach a while back visiting Meg and Sam, we went to Dam Neck beach one night after dinner for a quick stroll.

I’ve been meaning to blog about it ever since because I wanted to share these photos with y’all. And I’m sure those of you who are experiencing cold weather and gloomy skies and having to wear sweaters under your coats and scarves really want to look at beach photos. Right, Aunt B?

Sometimes it’s really ridiculous how beautiful the ocean is. This was one of those times. There was a storm coming, so the sky was a weird, gorgeous color. We almost couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the water began.

This beach visit was the beginning of the end of Annalie’s fear of ocean waves, I think. She didn’t go in the water at all, but she was excited to be on the beach, and she went closer to the water—of her own free will—than she had in over a year.

Sam, however, was still a bit wary of the waves. He was happier staying way up on the dry sand, where no water would come near him, thank you very much.

He enjoyed giving his mom a sand facial, too. I don’t remember exactly the series of events that led up to this photo. I think Sam just forgot he had sand all over his hands, or didn’t realize it was a problem, and patted Meg on the cheeks. It was pretty funny.

It was also funny how I could NOT get Annalie to stand still in a photo. She agreed to pose with Sam for me readily enough, but then she couldn’t stop herself from dancing around, or kicking, or jumping.

But this photo is actually quite awesome, so I don’t mind that she couldn’t stand still. I don’t really like overly-formal photos that much anyway. Later I always look back at the group shots where someone is laughing with their eyes closed and mouth open, or where two people in the back row are looking at each other instead of the camera, or where one kid in the front is sticking his tongue out, and like those better than the ones where everyone is perfectly posed with semi-sincere smiles on their faces. The photos with a bit of life in them are always my favorites in the end, even I don’t always remember that when I’m behind the camera. Photos like these are a good reminder. And they work beautifully as a memento of an hour spent on the beach with friends, marveling at the strange, stormy beauty of the sea and sky.

p.s. Ten points to the first person to correctly identify the source of the post title!

Whew. I didn’t plan on taking a mini blog break like that, especially during a weekend when so much was going on, but I’m still sick. I barely had the energy to upload photos for the past few days, and was completely uninterested in doing anything more with my evenings than sprawling on the couch and staring mindlessly at the TV for a few hours.

Annalie is pretty much completely recovered, except for the occasional cough. My mom is mostly better too, thanks to the Z-pak she was prescribed for the bronchitis she was developing. And I’m definitely on the mend—I’m coughing a bit less and feeling closer to normal every day—but my immune system is still busy fighting whatever crud this is. I suspect it probably is H1N1, and am thankful I wasn’t sicker, but…MAN I am tired of coughing, and needing an extra hour or two of sleep every night. I’ll be very glad when I’m back to normal.

So, where did I leave off? Right! Heather was here to visit me and Brenda for the weekend, and we had a fantastic visit. The time flew by much too quickly, of course, as it always does. We painted pottery on Friday, because that was the first thing Heather asked to do when she was here. But on Saturday we decided we’d better do something more California-touristy: a picnic on the beach!

It was a gorgeous fall day, sunny and warm but not hot. We took lots of yummy food and big blankets and relaxed on the beach, eating and talking and soaking up the sun. We marveled at the giant brown kelp that had washed up on the beach, Bug chased the seagulls away, and Annalie splashed happily in the waves.

Considering how scared she was of the waves till just recently, Annalie certainly has become a beach bunny. I think she could have spent hours running in and out of the water.

After we dragged Annalie away from the beach, it was time for some sightseeing and shopping. Heather wanted to find gifts for her kids, and Brenda and I both immediately thought of all the fun shops in Old Town.

We spent a couple of hours wandering around, browsing the shops and walking through the art fair that’s in Old Town on Saturdays. We bought a fruit cup from a vendor, said “no thanks” to his offer of chili powder, and everyone snacked on the fresh cucumber, jicama, mango, pineapple and watermelon as we walked along.

Heather found presents for all her kids, and even generously bought little leather purses for Annalie and Bug, which they both loved and carried around everywhere they went for the rest of the weekend (you can see Annalie’s in the photos below). We ended the afternoon with some freshly-made tortillas from our favorite Mexican restaurant. Yum!

Sunday, we didn’t do the traditional breakfast of doughnuts on Snail Mountain. Brenda had requested eggs Benedict, so that’s what we had for breakfast that morning. After Heather was all packed up, we went up to Snail Mountain just for fun. And we took lots of photos.

From there we took Heather to In-N-Out for a quick lunch, and then dropped her off at the airport. Everyone hugged her good-bye, assured her that she’d be missed, and wished her safe travels. Then we stopped at the mall to pick up the pottery we’d painted, because it was ready in record time! I already mailed Heather the commemorative mug that Brenda painted, and next time we go paint I’m gonna get Brenda to paint me one too.

Thanks for coming all the way to California to visit us, Heather! You’re always welcome at our house, wherever we happen to be. And bring the rest of your family next time so you won’t miss them so much!

The first time I ever made eggs Benedict was when Brenda asked me—after she realized that if someone throws down the cooking gauntlet it’s almost impossible for me not to accept the challenge—if I could. I’d never made them before, but I pulled out my favorite cookbook, found the recipe, and said, “Yeah, I can make that.”

Making eggs Benedict is actually not that hard. It involves poaching some eggs, toasting some English muffins, heating slices of ham in a skillet, and whisking together egg yolks, butter, and lemon juice in a double boiler—all simple enough tasks. Where it gets tricky is that you kind of have to do all those things at the same time. Even so, it’s doable, and completely worth it.

Eggs Benedict
4 servings

• 4 eggs
• 2 english muffins, split in half
• 4 thin slices of ham or Canadian bacon
• paprika for garnish
• Hollandaise sauce (recipe below)

Grease a large skillet with nonstick spray and fill halfway with water. Set over medium-high heat. When water is just beginning to simmer, reduce heat to low. Break one egg into a measuring cup and gently slide the egg into the water. (The white of the egg will spread out, but don’t be scared you’re doing it wrong, it will come together more as it cooks.) Repeat with remaining eggs. Let cook until whites are opaque and yolks are set but not hard. Remove from water with a slotted spoon to a plate and set aside.

Toast the English muffin halves and butter them, if you like. Set each toasted muffin half on a plate and set aside. (The first time I made this I didn’t have any English muffins and used whole-wheat bread instead. It tasted just as good.)

Place the ham in a small skillet and place over medium-low heat until the ham is heated through. Flip each slice over and remove the skillet from heat, but leave the ham in the pan so it stays warm.

Make the Hollandaise sauce (recipe below). Place the ham slices on top of the toasted muffin halves, and top each one with a poached egg. Spoon Hollandaise sauce over each egg, and sprinkle with paprika. Serve immediately.

Hollandaise Sauce

The first time I made Hollandaise, I accidentally used half as much butter as the recipe I was using called for, and I doubled the amount of lemon juice because I thought 1 Tablespoon wasn’t enough. I’ve made it that way ever since because I liked it.

• 3 egg yolks
• 1/4 c. butter, cut into three pieces
• 2 Tbsp. lemon juice, freshly-squeezed if possible
• 1 Tbsp. water
• salt and pepper

In the top of a double boiler with water simmering in the bottom (I use a Pyrex bowl set into a saucepan with a small amount of water in it—you don’t want the bottom of the bowl to touch the water), combine the eggs yolks, lemon juice, and water with a whisk. Add one piece of butter and stir with the whisk constantly till the butter is melted. Repeat with remaining pieces of butter, then continue cooking and stirring till sauce thickens and is a creamy yellow color. Continue cooking and stirring another minute or so. Add a dash of salt and pepper. If sauce thickens too much, add a bit of hot water from the bottom of the boiler and stir till smooth.

Remember how we ended up staying in Omaha for a few extra days because we were sick? We weren’t in any shape to notice the fall colors for the first few days we were there; we were busy lying around, coughing and moaning.

Annalie got sick before I did, and she started feeling better before I did too. After a few days being stuck in the house, she was bouncing off the walls and we were forced to let her play outside lest she break something.

After taking three photos in a row for Troy where we were lying down, we finally took one where we were not only are we awake and sitting up, but outside the house. Once we were outside, I noticed the fall colors starting to appear.

I don’t recall the bushes that border my parents’ property ever changing color in fall…yet here is one patch that did change color this year. Maybe it’s because they’re old? They’ve been there more than 30 years, probably.

There were ladybugs all over my parents’ front door the last day we were there. Is it ladybug season in October?