Bedknobs & Broomsticks (and Halloween costumes!)

Everyone, think warm thoughts for Noel, who reports that Utah is currently getting snow. SNOW!




I'm kinda jealous. Even though Noel's NOT very happy about snow, seeing as (1) he's working at night, which is chilly, and (2) snow makes it chillier, usually. Poor guy. And no potato soup or chili or chicken & dumplings to warm him up. Sniff sniff.



(Also, as a side note, he's already requesting food for his Welcome Home meal, which isn't going to occur for another 4 weeks or so. The menu so far? Chicken & dumplings, homemade bread, biscuits, chicken cordon bleu, apple pie, and mashed sweet potatoes. Oh, and also fried okra. If he keeps thinking of new things for me to make, I'll need to start cooking next week.)



Coming up this weekend is one of my very favorite holidays: Halloween!



As usual, I was tasked with the honor of making my nieces' costumes. Today I mailed them off, and I don't have any pictures. But! My mom took some, and I'm sure my sister will take some as well. I'll post them asap! What were they? Oh dear reader, that's a surprise! Neither involved blue tentacles though. :)



Since the house we currently rent is a bit in the country, we probably won't have any trick or treaters. Which is kind of a shame, since that gives me the justification to buy (and frequently sample) bags of candy. I might have to taste test some anyway.



In order to get myself in the mood for costume making last week, I put up some decorations, which the cats immediately pulled down. I put them up in a different place, and they pulled them down again. At this point I decided that, being black cats, they themselves qualify as decorations, and left it at that. Instant Festivity! Just add Fancy Feast.



Decorations (or whining cats, as the case may be) can help with the whole Almost Halloween feeling, but you really need something extra. Personally, I love watching spooky/Halloween themed movies too, and so now the library thinks I have a toddler at home. My most recent rentals? It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown; Nanny McPhee; and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. That last one is so cute - Angela Lansbury is adorable.



I also rented Charlie's Angels too - not the movie. Oh no. The tv show - complete with high-waisted bellbottoms and mega-hair. HILARIOUS. Does it make me old to admit that I still want Jacquelyn Smith's hair?




Anyway, the Halloween costumes are done, the decorations are happily snoozing in front of the heater, and Angela Lansbury's about to singlehandedly defeat the Nazis.




So in the spirit of a little scare being good for you, I present a gratuitous Creepy Cow Photo:

Cuz this is THRIIIIILLERRRRRRR! THRILLER NIGHT! (cue dancing zombies)

Leaves A'Turning....

Autumn has definitely arrived here in western NC! (If spring has sprung, has fall fallen?)

The leaves have started turning...

and the fall festivals have begun!

Mom and I went to the Lunsford Festival, a small but fun event in Mars Hill, NC, held a few weeks ago. There were lots of people selling handicrafts and such, and of course, there was food! And when I say food, I mean FOOD. The local baptist church was making bbq:

How's THAT for a cooker?

Also loved their t-shirts. Heh.

We saw some other friends working on stirring a big cauldron:

What's in it? Only one of the best things ever invented:

Homemade apple butter!! YUM.

If you've never had real apple butter, especially with homemade biscuits...well...I just kinda feel sorry for you. ;)

In other food news, my aunt and I went to a quilt show last weekend. There were some real beauties there.

There was even a seasonally appropriate quilt!

But wait...what do quilts have to do with food? Well, I'll show you!

This was an entry in their junior category. Fun!

I liked this one too - good 3D illusion.

This one is an embroidered quilt with manatees, which has nothing to do with food. Hopefully. It's just pretty.

Also this little square seemed appropriate. :)

Anyway, all this deliciousness over the past few weeks inspired me to dig out the ol' baking sheet. I decided to do chocolate chip cookies to send to Noel and my friend Lisa, as well as try out a new recipe for old-fashioned molasses cookies. These didn't look promising.

Eeew.

Thankfully, 10 minutes in the oven made all the difference in the world, and Lisa reported that she loved them for their yummy spiciness. Yay!

On another tack, Animal News! We have a new neighbor!!

Isn't he cute? I couldn't get a better picture because he runs into his burrow (which is right beside the driveway.) I was dorkily thrilled over having a neighborhood groundhog. :)

The boys are doing fine, enjoying the cooler weather, because that means space heater time! And they love their space heater. :) We've also been prepping for Halloween, which involves digging out the Halloween DVDs.

Poe loves Garfield.

Wild & Wonderful!

HAPPY OCTOBER!!!

I'm tired of complaining about slow internet as an excuse for lack of blogging, so I'll skip it. You're welcome. :)

Update: Change that. This is my FOURTH attempt at posting this in as many days. Sigh. Just imagine, if it weren't for our miserable excuse for internet service, you'd be reading about what actually happened YESTERDAY, not 2 weeks ago. Oy.

So things are going well here in Chez Hairball, except we all miss Noel. He's still working his butt off in Utah, learning the importance of warm clothing in climates with huge temperature fluctuations, and the value of lotion in a low-humidity environment.

Here in NC, meanwhile, the kitties and I are enjoying the first crisp days of autumn. The leaves haven't turned yet, but I promise to take (and post!) pictures when they do!

2 weekends ago, my mom and I drove up to West Virginia to visit my dear grandmother and 2 of my aunts and their husbands. Now, some people give West Virginia a hard time, whipping out the duelling banjos song from Deliverance (although that movie was in Georgia, heh), and thinking generally it's full of...well...not much.

I heartily disagree. I have traveled much of this country (at this point 39 of the 50 states), and can say that West Virginia is unequivocally one of the most beautiful. Granted, I haven't seen North or South Dakota, Iowa, or Wisconsin. But barring the evil influences of cheese, I can't imagine they look anywhere near as stunning as WV.

I say this because (1) I encourage those of you who've never been there to drive through there one day, and (2) to make up for my photos, which are...dark and, well, really a bit colorless. It was a gray day for photos, very overcast, and these just don't do the state justice.

The motto for West Virginia is Wild, Wonderful. And they're right! You can drive through areas where there are no people. NO PEOPLE. No walmarts! No strip malls! No traffic jams! Just gorgeous indigenous forests festooning the rolling mountains as far as they eye can see.

We had a fantastic visit with family up there. So much so that I forgot to take out my camera. Oops! Thankfully my Uncle Jim loves to take pictures, and he promised to send me a CD with the ones he took. Then I'll pirate his pictures to put up here. (You can take 50% of royalties, Jim. That'll be about....$0. Sorry).

One fun thing about going to WV is that you have to go through 2 big tunnels to get there (at least the way we went). When my sister and I were kids, we would hold our breath through any tunnel we went through, because if you can hold your breath to the other side, you get a wish.

These tunnels make breath-holding a serious Olympian-sized challenge. These tunnels go through an entire mountain.


One is just under, and the other just over, 1 mile long. Impressive!

Also there's a buckwheat festival in the town where my grandmother lives. No, not the Little Rascal, the grain. They have rides, parades, and yummy buckwheat pancakes at the fire house to raise money. We missed the buckwheat festival by 1 weekend. Sigh. Mom was happy because there would be no traffic. I was devastated, because honestly? How often do you have firemen cook breakfast for you?

In addition to the impressively huge tunnels, West Virginians also boast the Western Hemisphere's longest single arch bridge! Bet you didn't know that! (Now you're ready go to on Jeopardy). It's called the New River Gorge Bridge, and it's impressive. Mom and I went to the scenic overlook to try to get a good view of it.

We walked toward the pedestrian walkway to the overlook:


Oooooooohhhh!!! Autumny!!! This will be a lovely little relaxing stroll through the woods.


Oh wait.

We sucked it up and went anyway, and the view was lovely! Here's the bridge:


And way down there is the little old bridge that the new one made obsolete.

Apparently it used to take people a long time to drive down into the gorge and back out again, and the new bridge has cut that time to just about 40 seconds. Here's a graph to show how tall the new bridge is:


You know it's big when your currency is National Monuments. :)

The scenery was really pretty from up there though. The leaves weren't really changing much there either, so at least my pictures weren't a total disaster.

We finished with our photo taking and saw something really scary:


The walk back up.

But we made it, throbbing thigh muscles intact. At least there was pretty scenery to look at!


We went to the visitors center too, and they had some quilts hanging up from the ceiling. Yay Team Quilting! So I took a few photos of them.


Then we saw this on the wall, and I thought y'all might appreciate. Enlarge if necessary, but I'll type what it says:


"Quilts made by slaves, free blacks, and Abolitionists were used as a means of secret communication on the Underground Railroad. Messages were hidden in plain view hanging from fences, clotheslines, and windows. Quilt patterns - including the use of specific colors, stitches, and pattern sequences - signaled escape, help, and safety.

The Monkey Wrench [top left corner] was displayed when an escape was being planned.

The Tumbling Blocks [top center] appeared when it was time to escape.

The Bear Paw [top right] signaled a proposed safe trail through the Appalachian Mountains.

The Shoo Fly [left middle row] signified a place to find clean clothing and take a bath. [Kelli: who says even abolitionist quilters didn't have a sense of humor?]

The Bow Tie [center middle row] meant there was a safe church in the area.

The Flying Geese [right middle row] pointed the direction to travel with a solid color band.

The Log Cabin pattern [lower left corner] with a black center block signified a safe house.

Drunkard's Path [lower center - my favorite quilt pattern] told runaways to zigzag and double back.

It is believed that in order to memorize the whole code, a sampler quilt was used. The sampler would include all the patterns arranged in the order the codes would appear.

Stitches and knots also played a role in the code. Stitches were placed to represent maps, and knots indicated a scale in miles.

The messages remained hidden in plain view until everyone planning to escape had completed the signaled task."

From: Hidden in Plain View - A Secret Story of Quilts & the Underground Railroad by J. L. Tobin & R. G. Dobard, PhD.

How incredible is that? I adore the idea of something so humble, so easily overlooked, as a handmade quilt thrown over a fence, being the beacon of hope that some poor soul was desperate to see to guide his or her way to freedom.