How Low Can We Go?

With the cooler temperatures setting in, we are trying our hardest to hold out until we have to turn on our heat. We are seriously dreading the winter gas bills, and so far we've been going strong. But, as I type this with partially frozen hands, I'm starting to feel like it's time. Here are a few signs I've been noticing around the house that suggest we just need to bite the bullet:

• Freezing cold toilet seat- This is reminiscent of my days in Medina when our furnace was having issues. I'd groggily wake up at 5 am for seminary, and I could see my own breath in the bathroom.
• Constantly damp bathroom towels- I think it's too cold in there for them to actually dry out after we shower.
• Spencer wearing flannel pants and a sweatshirt to bed- Although this is my normal bedtime attire, he NEVER does this. He's usually just content with shorts.

AND...

• An abnormally low temperature reading on our thermostat in the middle of the day.
  

If we vote against the furnace tonight, we'll at least be stopping by Target tonight to get some sort of space heater!

Halloween Party #1

Why the late Friday night post, you ask? Because Spencer passed out on the couch about an hour ago, and I'm not quite tired enough to join him.

Our ward Halloween party was tonight, and we dressed up. But, with the exception of one couple, no one really "got" our costumes. Everyone thought Spencer was some sort of dice, and I'm sure they all just thought I was a typical cat. But I assure you there was a reason I wore a skirt and tights for that cat costume.

I realize Spencer's hair is a little short, and mine isn't brown and curly, but seriously- do you know who we are??

As a side note: On our way to the party, we had to stop at Jo-Ann Fabrics for my cat ears and some black paper for Spencer's costume. Naturally, I had already drawn on my nose and whiskers. And you know what? Two people meowed at me. Not one, but TWO. No "Hi." No "Hey." Just "Meeeeoooow." Who does that?

Carving Pumpkins

This was the first Halloween since our marriage that we decided to be festive and actually carve pumpkins. We started last night at about 8:30pm and weren't finished until 12:30am! We were having a lot of fun being creative together.

Just getting started...

After we cleaned out the pumpkins, Spencer collected the seeds and made us a delicious treat!

We decided to scrape out our designs instead of completely cutting through the pumpkins. I remember doing that with my family when I was in high school, but I didn't remember it being so hard! We tried to scrounge up all of the good pumpkin scraping tools we could find, but all of our kitchen knives were too big. Then Spencer came up with a GENIUS idea:

We found his old dental tools from his undergrad years, and used them. They were perfect!

Getting closer... but still about 2 hours left!

This was the full array of tools we used. I highly recommend buying one of those little pumpkin carving kits- it was very easy to use.

The finished product! They really do have candles in them, and we turned off the lights so you could see them glow... but the flash on the camera kind of ruined it. Oops!

We will be taking them to the ward Halloween party on Friday night, and we're hoping they won't dry out before the 31st.

Patterson's Farm

After asking lots of 3rd and 4th year dental students about fun stuff to do in the area, we quickly learned that Patterson's Farm is a favorite for the locals.
In addition to selling incredibly overpriced pumpkins- the one Spencer is holding cost almost $17, the smaller ones around him were around $7- (so we'll be getting ours at Giant Eagle for $3.59)- they also had a store where you can buy apples and goodies. I was looking forward to picking some apples, but they rotate which orchards you can pick from, and the ones at the farm we went to were closed for the day. Blast.

But we did indulge in a few treats, like this delicious kettle corn (which I must say looks much more appetizing if you disregard the mass amounts of vegetable oil on the left):


And donuts. It was a healthy morning.

Our Night at the Disco

Last weekend we went to this really cool Disco Dance Club in downtown Cleveland. It was super fun- here's a video clip of our hot moves. Enjoy!

America's Roller Coast

On Saturday, we spent a very full day at Cedar Point, an amusement park on Lake Erie in northwestern Ohio. I had never been in the fall before, but it was definitely better than going in the summer: shorter lines (although they were still pretty long for the good stuff), cooler temperatures, and fewer folks that were scantily clad.

Kind of hard to take a cute picture when you're looking directly into the sun.

Our favorites were:

• Millenium Force- 92 mph with a 312 ft hill that dropped at 80 degrees!
• Maverick- the newest roller coaster in the park. At only 57 mph it hardly sounded daunting, and it didn't have any ferociously tall hills that looked super fun- but it did have plenty of awesome twists and turns. At one point it stopped us in a tunnel and then shot us out at 70 mph. So cool.
• Top Thrill Dragster- the tallest ride in the park (it's the yellow one to the left of Spencer in the picture above). Accelerated us to 120 mph in only 4 seconds, then took us up and over a super tall hill. I'm pretty sure I was laughing the whole time, and Spencer said he pretty much couldn't breathe until it was over because we were going so fast.
  

We got home at about 1:30am and went straight to bed. Whenever I lay down after riding roller coasters, I feel like I'm still riding one. That's how it was when I fell asleep Saturday night. Thank goodness for 12:30pm church the next day, or it would've been a rough morning!

More Visitors!

Shelby and Johnny Hansen came to visit us last night. Shelby and I went to grad school together, especially bonding in the spring of 2006 when both of our husbands were gone for long periods of time (Spencer selling alarms in Southern California, and Johnny doing an Air Force training in Alabama). We both lived at Wymount during spring term, so I would sometimes go over to her place to hang out. We even had a few sleepovers with other students, one for fun and one to study for our final for Dr. Fujiki's class on multicultural issues in speech-language pathology. I think we all got about 2 hours of sleep that night.

They currently living in Dayton, OH where Johnny is stationed with the Air Force. They were up visiting church sites in Kirtland and decided to visit us for a bit before heading home.

I felt privileged to be the first fellow grad student to see and hold her 6-week-old baby, Sol. Doesn't look too happy in this picture, but boy was he cute! We loved that full head of hair.