I ran out of birthday cards so I used my Martha Stewart butterfly punch to make this card. I punched butterflies in the actual card and put magazine images inside the card as well as punching butterflies from magazines and attaching them with adhesive dots to the front of the card.

While it was still nice out we went for an early morning cruiser ride down to the lake. Bill's sporting his rummage sale "deal of the summer"--$5 for a Patagonia Micro Puff jacket.

I made these:
Heavenly Pumpkin Brownies (whoorl.com)
Not nearly as good as the banana bars.

4 large eggs
2 cups sugar
1 cup butter, melted
1 cup canned pumpkin
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

Frosting:
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup butter, softened
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups powdered sugar
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. In a large mixing bowl of an electric mixer, beat the eggs well, add in the sugar and butter and mix well. Add the pumpkin and vanilla and mix. Add the flour and spices and mix well. Spread in a 9 X 13-inch greased pan.

2. Bake for 25-35 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool.

3. To make frosting: In a small bowl, beat cream cheese, butter, vanilla and powdered sugar until just mixed, careful not to over mix.

When the brownies are cool, frost. (I only needed to use about 1/2 of the frosting.) You can sprinkle chopped nuts on top of the brownies, if desired. Cut into squares and serve. Enjoy.

**I would add a little salt, I split the butter and used 1/2 cup unsweetend applesauce 1/2 cup butter, and I cooked it in a jelly roll pan. I need a better cream cheese frosting recipe...this doesn't taste quite right.

GUEST POST! GUEST POST! GUEST POST!

Hale and I went for a nice fall ride this past weekend.

Hot Chocolate was in order!

Mother Nature was treating us pretty well.

Then we came across this pile of newly razed (yet recently very healthy) trees.

Seems a real shame that the line-building company is so thorough in their clearing efforts. Do they really need to cut so much?

L'Attitude Marquette - at last has a website: http://lattitudecafe.com/

10-28-08...

Our neighbor was getting a new roof and leaves were almost all off the trees. Bill was checking to see if this bike was the right size.
We carved pumpkins and I used a drill with different sized bits to make a polka dot pumpkin.

We thought about roasting the seeds and kept them for a while then threw them away.

Compost Ride from Haley Rhoades on Vimeo.

We don't have a pickup truck...

And didn't want to get the car gunked up...

So we used the Burley and our cruisers...

And took four trips to the compost drop-off on Lakeshore. It is about a half-mile from our house and flat to slightly downhill on the way there. An empty trailer on the way back home made it a breeze.

Garden debris, leaves, acorns, and sunflowers are now at the compost. We got a few strange looks, a couple smiles, and a lot of people looking in the trailer for a kid. We almost bungee'd on the doll that we brought from Marinette but decided it would be better not to.

To remember. We're Consumer Reporting some windshield wipers. These are Winter Blades that Bill nicely installed a couple weekends ago. He was hard at work while I was planting the Daffodils. He had a small freakout when he put the passenger side blade on (see picture above). He first installed the driver's side and put the old driver's side blade into the new plastic container. When he went to install the passenger side he took the blade out of the plastic and installed it and called me over..."are you sure you got the right one?" Yup, he installed the old driver's side blade on the passenger door.

These Anco windshield wipers are heavy duty. The red ends on the wipers are the new ones and are completely enclosed in rubber to protect them from the snow/rain/ice. So far so good.

Kraft Foods Beef Stew - tasted more like pot roast and was a perfect trial for the Crock Pot.

Strange ingredients include: 2 piece of bacon, BBQ sauce, and Zesty Italian Dressing.

Broccoli Worm.

SICK! I cooked up some broccoli for lunch about a week ago and before I ate it I saw this grubby worm which changed my mind about actually eating this. SICK!

Last weekend I filled one of the raised bed gardens with daffodil bulbs. I set a tarp next to the 4x8 bed and shoveled half of the dirt that was in the garden onto the tarp then planted the bulbs. I covered the bulbs with the dirt that was on the tarp and watered the entire bed. This raised bed is right next to the sidewalk and in the winter gets covered with a tarp then about 4 feet of snow. We cover the beds with the tarps to keep the sand that the city uses on the icy roads out of the composted dirt. Last year I planted about 50 tulips. This year we will have lots of new perennials in the spring. My neighbors have been splitting up their hostas, day lilies, and irises and I've been planting them like crazy.

Continuing with the SEMCO post we scheduled Dupras Plumbing and Heating to tune up and clean our furnace. I took Friday morning off for the appointment.

I learned that our cold air returns should be open and free to move air. (Duh) They were drafty, so we sealed them off with insulation, carpet treads, and a fireplace.
I also learned that the people who owned the house before us didn't have the cold air ducts connected to the vents in the living room and dining room. Even though we blocked the vents with insulation and our faux fireplace they wouldn't have worked anyway because they weren't connected to the furnace. Last year Bill tore out the basement ceiling above the carpeted sewing area and replaced it in March. This is the area below the living room where the cold air duct was not and still is not connected. I think we're going to keep it sealed off with the fireplace where it was, under the window.

Bruce, the Dupras worker informed me that my husband could nail these foil wrapped cardboard pieces to the ceiling of the basement to connect the cold air return to the furnace. The grid thing on the ceiling is the cardboard. After Bruce left I, fully-caffeinated and no breakfast, used foil duct tape to attach the foil cardboard to the ceiling. I trimmed out sections of the grid where the electricity goes up through the floor and sealed it off. Looks good, eh?

Hoping that this air-flow stuff increases the efficiency of the furnace.

Semco is our gas supplier and I'm a stickler about keeping our SEMCO bill as low as possible. For example, the first year we lived there I was doing a comparison to the previous residents' consumption to try and use less than they did. The next year I wanted to see if our insulation job in the attic helped keep the house warmer.

I read the tips that all of the websites suggest about programming your thermostat, yada yada yada. We've had ours programmed for as long as we've been in the house. We also plastic wrap our old windows to keep the drafts out. This year however I have made some changes.

Previously we would have the heat set at 60 when we were at work and 64 when we were home and awake.

For example:

6:45am 64 degrees

7:45am 60 degrees

4:45pm 64 degrees

10:00pm 60 degrees

This year we're at:

6:45am 64 degrees

7:45am 60 degrees

4:45pm 62 degrees

10:00pm 59 degrees

I have also started chunking money away for our January and February heating bills so when the bills for those months come in around $175 we'll have some already paid. Last year our highest cost month was $190 in February.

Want to be our neighbor?

These houses are all for sale and are all in our neighborhood. They range in price from $105,000 to $425,000 (most between $130,000 and $189,000). Walking distance to Valle's (formerly Jack's IGA), Lake Superior beaches, Northern Michigan University, Marquette General Hospital, downtown Marquette, World Cup Speed Skating, NCAA Division 1 Hockey, and probably all have a Walk Score of over 75 (our house is a 78).

Michelle's Colorado Springs

I took these pictures last Christmas for my friend Sam who lived in Denver when she was growing up. Michelle's Chocolate Shop closed a few years ago and the building had been for sale for quite a while. Looks like it has recently been sold: click here. I wonder if they'll keep the sign up.

Banana Bars

I made these today. I had to give a lot of them away or we would have eaten every single one. I made them in a jelly roll pan and it made 42 bars! Seriously delicious.

The Heat is On

October 1, 2009 our house was 56 degrees inside and we turned the heat on. In September we talked about the temperature at which we would turn the heat on. I'm pretty sure I said when it was in the 50's that we would. The last couple of days it was tolerable--except the tile floor in the bathroom--brrr. After work we had been wearing winter hats inside to stay warm and we'd open the curtains at lunch time and the house would heat up from 56 to a balmy 57.

There was frost on the ground yesterday when we went to work and we've been parking the car in the garage to avoid scraping frost from the windows.

Two years ago it was September 12!

Plans for October: