Happy Halloween!!!

I'm still struggling with finding enough time to blog, but I couldn't let the last day of October pass by without a little recap of some of the fun stuff we've been up to this month :)

A few weekends ago, Peter and I took a little trip to Woodbine, MD, to do some apple picking and pumpkin selecting at Larriland Farm.

 Obviously, we were not the only people at Larriland Farm that day :) It was quite the happenin' spot!

I had never been apple picking before, and I loved it! Part of the reason I loved it was probably because we only spend about a half-hour picking. Some of my fellow apple-pickers looked like they had been there all day and had bushels and bushels of apples. I wondered what they were going to do with all of those apples?!!!

Searching for only the best!

Gotcha!

We also visited the punkin' patch which I had not done since I was a Brownie in Girl Scouts. We had some trouble picking our pumpkins so we created a pumpkin line up of sorts :)

And the winner is ...

We also made sure to sample the apple fritters that the local high-school cheerleading team was selling as a fund-raiser. Yum! So much appley goodness!!!

Last weekend the carving of the pumpkins and the roasting of the pumpkin seeds took place :)

 Pumpkin guts seriously make me want to throw up, but Peter is definitely OK with them. Gross!!!

The finished products. Mine is supposed to be winking. Peter's is supposed to have been maimed in some kind of pumpkin brawl :)

We also roasted pumpkin seeds which Peter always did growing up. It was super easy, and the roasted seeds were pretty tasty (and I'm assuming extremely healthy). We washed them off really well, sauteed them in a couple of tablespoons of butter, spread them out on a cookie sheet, and then roasted them for 45 minutes in a 200 degree oven. Ta-da!!!

Whatever your plans are for tonight (trick-or-treating, handing out candy, awesome costume party, etc.), I hope that you have a very fun Halloween :)

Checking in ...

 (image via Google)

It was not my intention to take a 3-week break from blogging, but that's what happened :) And the reason why it happened was because I started a new job! The job is within the agency where I've worked for several years so I didn't have to change my commute, get used to a new building, etc. But the work is substantially different from what I've been doing for the last 8 years so there's quite a learning curve. I think that it's going OK, but the trying-to-keep-on-top-of-things hasn't left much time for the ole blog. I hope to get back to more regular blogging soon because I miss it, but I need to nail down my schedule a bit more so that I can actually figure out when I can post (and not be exhausted and distracted)! This new job could be a really good change for me, but I have to confess that I hate change :( I'm a traditional kind of girl who likes her routines, familiar faces, and everything to just stay the same. But change is a part of life that I can't change so I need to learn to get used to it :) And grow from it! It's humbling to go from a position where I had a lot of autonomy and was sort of "expert" at what I did to one where I have to work as part of a team and know next to nothing about what I'm doing, but a good dose of humility is a good thing now and again and I know that I need to challenge myself once in awhile (I was getting very bored in my previous position to be honest!). The next year will be much harder than the previous one at work, but it could be loads better too :)