trees, gourds and sprouts. and a car.

Things going on:

We bought a new car! Huzzah!

Andrew's starting making terrible engine noises on the way back from WI a few weeks back. After checking it out, it was either 1: new engine or 2: new car. Considering the body of his car was in pretty bad shape and we were thinking about getting a new car sometime in the next year anyway... new car it is!

Car shopping is a huge pain in the ass. You spend a lot of time looking on websites to find vehicles in your price and mileage range, then go to the car lot to see that the car is in worse condition than it looked online or that it's been sold already. We were very close to buying a different car and while we were giving the dealer 36 hours to think about putting new tires on it, someone else bought the car. That was disappointing, but I really like the car we bought and it's in great condition and has less miles than the other car. So go us!

Since our evenings were consumed with car researching/test driving/buying for the past two weeks, the house pretty much went to shit. I only finished the last of the Massive Pile of dishes yesterday (it was so massive that it deserves uppercase). It didn't help that we needed to continue to eat, thus adding to the Massive Pile. We also had a Big-Ass Pile of laundry, but we did that on Sunday.

I opened up a retirement account - woo! Considering the economy is shit, I'm in a pretty aggressive fund, hoping that by the time I retire at 88, I'll have enough to pay for a mediocre old folk's farm. I'm not betting that Sam will take care of me in my old age... he seems pretty thankless.

Sam spends a lot of time sitting or trying to sit on our laps.

Ok, that's Dia. I took that to make Sam jealous.

Andrew cut down this big ass tree and we want to make a cutting board from the wood cookie:

For scale.

Although that little shit has been taking bites out of the bark. I found him chewing on a hunk of bark just this morning.

I just made a batch of acorn squash seeds using my patented "forget about them and remember in a panic" method. They are pretty damn tasty. I'm going to try gnocchi this afternoon.

I bought a pumpkin at the store and made pumpkin puree. I haven't used it for anything yet, so I'm open to suggestions of pumpkin-flavored deliciousness.

I also bought two stalks(? sprouts?) of Brussels sprouts at the farmers market while I was on the way home from a happy hour last week. Impluse purchase? No, never. Not when it comes to Brussels sprouts. We're down to one last serving of sprouts from the two stalks, so that'll be my lunch today.

Ok, there's a finale episode of Project Runway that's calling my name, so time to go cook sprouts and make gnocchi. Bacher out.