Hope your house has been full of knocks at the door tonight!  And hopefully we will get rid of all our candy!!!

B was Astrid from How to Train Your Dragon.

Inspiration here:

And B here:

The highlight was the “Russian Wolf”  fabric and the fact that she used a rubber mallet from the garage for her Viking inspired weapon.

And ps, if you have not seen the movie, rush to your nearest independent video store and rent it immediately!

D was a spider…

HA!  For those of you who don’t know, I adore spiders. B has made me the house’s chief spider catcher.  I take my job very seriously!

Right now, roaring fire, munching on popcorn, and crafting.  Ah, good Halloween indeed!

Also this past week, in the Halloween category of life,  my (D’s) office participated in a little pumpkin carving contest to benefit the Seattle chapter of Architects’ Without Borders.  And, after making a majority of the office participate… Tuesday night we were awarded Scariest Pumpkin.  This might be a new claim to fame on my resume!

{seriously, people… you want to see good pumpkins… go to one of these events where architects carve.  I think we all pretend we are back in school building models or something!}

And on an unrelated but very important note…. We ask that you all keep THIS very special little girl in your prayers tomorrow as she undergoes surgery to become tumor-free.

Happy Halloween!

Thursdays are always the toughest (so close to Friday but just not there!) and today the rain is back. To make matters worse, last night I went to a crazy intense yoga class that was led like a football skills clinic. I kid you not at one point the guy actually referred to our series of poses as a “drill”. Ugh, SO not the relaxed focused workout I had been looking for, and I am hurting this morning.

So, to temper things, I’m going to post some pretty bathroom inspiration photos from Sunset/My Home Ideas. I’ve been working with my parents to come up with ideas for their master bathroom remodel and these are some beautiful things I’ve found along the way. Enjoy.

Ladder is so cute!

Love the river rock around the tub

Not so plausible with neighbors 10' away, but perfect for a getaway house

I like the midcentury flair of this one

Oh, and also, loving this crate shelf on casters spotted at Door Sixteen:

Great project for thrifted fruit crates

I am not all that thrilled about Monday today.

The weekend was pretty darn good though.  It probably has something to do with the fact that B and I have been out of town the past two weekends.  By the time Friday happened … I was exhausted.  I had lofty goals of a productive Friday evening… but after work and a quick trip to the gym and making some dinner… I was practically ready for bed.

A few exciting things did happen this weekend though…

We got the house ready for fall and B did this spooky Halloweeny mantle…

and then we had the first fire of the season… & finished some craft projects… & organized some things around here…

We treated ourselves to a dinner out on Sunday night a favorite neighborhood joint and got Mahi Mahi tacos with mango and guacamole.  Yum!  For some dinnertime conversation we brought along our crazy-thick voter’s pamplets in an attempt to read through what all these initiatives are and begin to fill out our ballots.  I am so tired of those TV commercials leading up to election day…. AH!

We planted some more tulip bulbs and did some weeding and had some yard master planning discussions with a surprise few sunshiney hours on Sunday…

And I got a new lens for my camera delivered from Amazon.  I had been looking and looking and wanting it… so finally I just did it.   I was pretty darn excited when it showed up …

And, it showed up just in time to play with it on Saturday when we went over to the twins’ and had a lil photo shoot for their family.  :  )

I have to say, the lens is pretty darn awesome.  Initial reasoning… the ability to get my aperture set as large as 1.8 is just terrific.  I think that if you ever know anyone that is moving to Seattle with an SLR you should get them this lens.   The fact is.. I won’t use a flash unless I have to take a photo at night.  I abhor a direct flash and what that does to the color of my photos.   So during 7 months of the year I am on a constant quest for good lighting.   I hardly take photos after work and on a weekend day I am still struggling to photo indoors.  It usually involves a bunch of exposure/brightness/etc balancing in photoshop.   But with this new lens… and Without much of my typical settings being changed but the f-stop (aperture)… It was SO MUCH EASIER to shoot in a low light setting.  It was so so fast and blured the background WAY better then I have ever done before.

So … while the parents went to get ready for the family photos… B and I sat downstairs and played with the babies.  Well actually baby.   Ethan choose to sleep even though I kept whispering to him that we were taking pictures…. I think he might have whispered back something abou needing his beauty rest for the afternoon.

But Kaylee.. she is a happy picture subject.

Here is a pretty typical photo I would take with my Nikon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G AF-S DX VR Nikkor Zoom Lens.  Even with the Vibration Reduction setting on… In order to get enough light the picture is really blurry.  Babies move ….

Now, seconds later, I popped on my new lens…. Nikon 35mm f/1.8G AF-S DX

So same lighting, same baby, same color/indoor/all that jazz settings on my camera.  This photo just is taken with a lens that got my aperture up to 1.8.

Oh, and she is looking at me now.  Cause she likes my camera clicking. : )

Oh, and I did not Photoshop either of these.  Not even color or brightness or crop or anything.

Now, there are a few things I am really going to have to get used to after day one with this lens on.   All of a sudden  I am getting more light, so the white balance settings I had already customized on my camera where a bit off.    And… it is now possible to get too much light.  Whoa.  That has pretty much never happened to me before.  I could definitely tell sharpness/light/color were some things I cannot wait to practice more .  And the whole one size business.  I walked a lot more and moved a lot more… where before i would have twisted my lens to zoom.  But apparently, according to every blog I could find researching this puppy, I will get used to that.

But the babies… they make excellent lil subjects.  So cutey.

House Reflected in the Fish Pond

 When we showed up a little before noon to buy tickets, we found that the next places for tours inside the house was almost 5 pm! So, we went up to the grounds, took a tour of the garden (no wait), and led ourselves through all the self guided areas of the house. We’ll do the house inside next time, although i think the grounds are really the most spectacular part.

View back to Norfolk

 As part of the development of the estate, Thomas Jefferson decided he needed more room for growing food for all the folks that lived and worked on-site. So, he developed a plot just below the house that is about 40′ x 1000′ long. Thats 40,000 square feet of veggies, herbs, and fruits. And that doesn’t include the orchards and vineyards that continue even further down below. ALTHOUGH. they did tell us that because water is scarce at Monticello, there is no evidence that they had irrigiation back in the day, so it likely didn’t look as green and lush as it does today.

Part of 1,000 foot long vegetable garden plot

 Around the main lawn there were all sorts of fun and funky plants that TJ planted as experiments. Many of these seeds were obtained in seed swaps with other political leaders This one was like a painted poinsettia. According to the guide, if yu didn’t have this one in your Victorian garden, you might as well have not had a garden at all!

Pretty plant discovery

 After the garden tour, we took some time to walk around and see all the service portions of the house which are rich with texture and history.

Rich textures in cellar hallway

Wood and steel floor structure (nerd alert!)

Single wine bottle dumbwaiter - great idea!

Beautiful autumn foliage

Relaxing on the lawn

 After our day at Monticello, it was time to head back to our little home away from home to cook dinner. I did some searching for cute places to stay around Charlottesville, but since there was a UVA game in town that weekend, a lot of things were booked. I stumbled upon these converted Caboose cabins at Heavenly Acres Campground, so we stayed here. They were cute, although we were kind of far away from most everything, so it wasn’t quite as convenient as I’d hoped.

Our Caboose

 Sunday afternoon was back to Norfolk. We tried to go to a waterfront wine festival, but showed up too late to get tickets, so we just wandered along the water instead.

Goldilocks!

Battleship at twilight

It was a great early fall weekend. Beautiful weather and scenery, fall apples, good company. Anyone have any Virginia recommendations for my next trip?

I ordered this sweatshirt from LLBean signature a couple weeks back (on sale!) and it showed up while I was in Norfolk for the weekend – so I get to wear it today for the first time. This is my first purchase from the new LL Bean signature collection (their site dedicated to hipper fashion), and i’m dang happy!

Sailor Striped Sweatshirt

While still the coziness of a sweatshirt, the cut is chic enough that i can wear to the office on a Friday and not feel totally frumptastic. Its warm but not suffocating, and has cute nautical charm that I’m (not surprisingly), all about these days.

Check out LLBean Signature, though – totally cute stuff, I’m a happy shopper so far!

[Complete disclosure: I actually wanted to wear my new Saints shirt today, but I couldn't find it this morning!! boo]