Amanda and I got a call from our across-the-street-neighbor, Bonnie, at about 9:15 to see if we could come over in about ten minutes to rank some carved pumpkins. Milly was already asleep, of course, so we took the baby monitor with us. It actually got range halfway into Bonnie’s yard. It’s a good thing we took it too, because Bruce and Harvey got upset and were howling, which we heard ever so faintly on the monitor, so I ran back across the street and put them outside.
Out of the five, Amanda and I had a consensus favorite, a consensus third favorite and a consensus last place, but we had out second and fourth places switched. First place was an intricately-carved scary face done by Bonnie’s cousin Billy. Last place went to a fish that Billy’s girlfriend carved for Dave, who didn’t want to carve a pumpkin. The middle three were ghosts and a cat.
We carved our Jack O’ Lantern last week and it’s already mostly caved in on itself. It was pretty warm some days this week, and Amanda pointed out that that might happen.
The rest of the day was mostly uneventful. It was dreary outside and Milly’s still recovering from her cold, so we didn’t want to take her outside anywhere. Amanda over-warmed leftover waffles for breakfast, so they were kind of hard. They still tasted fine, but they were brittle and very hard to cut, which isn’t how you want your waffles. I still had two though.
Milly had been awake early and got cranky early, so we put her down for her nap early. Amanda watched TV while she was down. I discovered that my Google search results had been hijacked, so I went to work on figuring out the cause. I removed a program I’d downloaded yesterday to test out, figuring that had to be the cause, then ran a few scans on the computer. Those made a few changes, but I was still having my search results hijacked. I did a little more digging around and figured out that a change must have been made to my host file, which tells your computer where to look for different sites on the internet. The host file was hidden and I couldn’t get it to show up, but I used a backup I’d made a while back to overwrite the hidden one and now everything works just like it should. Hurrah!
After I took care of that I joined Amanda in the living room. She was watching a reality show about soap opera stars. There was this one guy who was all worried about being in a fashion show and walking down the runway, but when it showed him with his shirt off I told Amanda, “His abs are the opposite of mine.” She laughed a little too much at that.
We watched Duke play Virginia Tech in football. Even Amanda was interested in the game, which is a rare thing indeed when it comes to football. It was very frustrating though. The final score was 14-10 and the Hokies, I’m pretty sure, scored all their points in the first quarter. It was at least the first half. Duke was in position to take the lead multiple times, but just couldn’t do it. They also missed three field goal attempts. Making just two of them would have won the game. As a team, Duke has been in position to win a few of their losses this season. Hopefully they’ll be able to start getting over that hump.
As I’m typing this I’m watching Georgia Tech getting ready to beat #5 Clemson, and Stanford, the #6 team in the nation, looks like they might lose to USC.
Anyway, after Milly got up she helped me make some Rice Krispie Treats. These are much better than my last batch, as I didn’t leave them in the pan nearly as long. They’re very light and soft, though Amanda said they’re a bit too sweet for her. I guess different marshmallows have different results. We used big ones this time (since they were left over from a fondue from a few weeks ago), but last time we used little ones.
Milly got a bit cranky around dinner time, but she lightened up when we watched Up afterwards. She helped us clean up her toys then went to bed. Amanda and I watched Supernatural and judged the pumpkins then watched an episode of Beavis and Butthead, which recently made a return to MTV. I didn’t really care that it was coming back, but I saw a preview clip of it online and figured I’d take a look. I was entertained.
Zach Dotsey