The Week of Weddings

Last week we celebrated Thanksgiving, but mostly Steve and I were concerned about weddings. Steve's brother, Glen, and Sam, a friend from medical school, were both married last week.

First, we went to Glen's wedding.

This is them dancing at the reception

The wedding ceremony was so tender and the reception was a lot of fun. I was glad they had dancing and I made Steve dance with me.

It was really exciting because we were able to see Steve's family,

Cindy took the girls out to get our nails done,

And after the wedding Steve and I had dinner with some of my old roommates

Thanks Glen and Nicole for letting us come celebrate with you!

We came home on Friday night and then Saturday went to Abilene for Sam's wedding. The ceremony was also very wonderful and we had a lot of fun, despite the 2 1/2 hour drive.

Camporee

These are Fort Worth 8th wards scouts at the Camporee. Steve went with them a few weeks ago and they had a blast. Besides having incorrect information where is was actually being held and subsequently not arriving until about 10pm everything went great. What the camporee entails is 8 events that the scouts compete in. Our boys placed in 6 of the 8 events. Go Fort Worth 8th Ward!

Autumn

Although you wouldn't be able to tell by the 70 degree weather, it is Autumn; you can tell from the pecans. But, we have had some cold days, and apparently it rained 20 out of 31 day in October. A few weeks ago at TCOM's annual powder puff football game it was freezing, and I was almost confident I could put away the t-shifts, but no go.


But, Halloween was fun. The night before Steve and I went to the Hatch's house and carved pumpkins with them and the Radsdales. Derek and Lee are in Steve's class. I'm mostly not artistic at all, but I had fun anyways. Our pumpkin is the one on the far right. Steve did the awesome eye brows and tongue.


We also decided to add a plant to our home. This is Kathy. We bought her at The Botanical Gardens. Now we do love her, but the person we bought her from was just a little bit on the possessive side. He'd been growing her for years. Whelp, $2 later and she was ours. She lives in Steve's study because it needed some green.

You know Carolyn's gone Crazy When:

As we all know this past Saturday we celebrated Halloween, the official start of the holiday season. At work my department decided to dress up like a zoo. I reluctantly put on some cat ears and called myself a panther, but what I was really excited about was the pumpkin cinnamon rolls I planned to make.

Thursday night I came home from work and went straight to the kitchen. I used home pureed pumpkin for them. They rose, I filled and baked and they smelled delicious, all seventeen of them. But, I wanted to make sure they tasted okay. I took a bite of one and wasn't sure. I was mostly confident there was no way I could let other people eat these, but I wanted to get a second opinion. Enter husband. Now Steve is a frank person, but he also knows how much food means to me, so when I asked his opinion at first he hmmed and haaahed. But then, as he swallowed he started coughing and asked for a cup of water. Nice. "You can't win them all he said." I left his study and sat on the couch trying to resolve the issue.

That's when the little guy on my shoulder started talking. "You could always go to the store and buy canned pumpkin; you know it will be better like that." Turning to the left, "But, it will take all that work and it's already 8:45; you need to go to bed on time." And to the right, "You can't afford to go buy donuts in the morning; if you start now you can have them rising and can bake them in the morning." I'm not sure which voice was wearing the red, but it took me about 30 seconds to put on some shoes and head to Target.

Target is the closest grocery store to my house. Although I should call it Super Target. The food makes it super I suppose. I arrived at 8:50pm and rushed to the baking isle. First I grabbed dark brown sugar (the recipe called for this and on my first attempt used light and I needed all the help I could get). Then I looked around for the pumpkin and probably to nobody's surprise there wasn't any on the shelf. But, no fear, I'll grab a sales associate because surely there must be some in stock room. "I'm looking for canned pumpkin?" "Oh, we're out, he was looking for it too, we've been out for a month now." Now, I can understand being out of canned pumpkin; it is the Autumn season, pumpkin is popular. But, really, did the person doing the ordering not think that the month they ordered 10 times as much candy that maybe one person in the entire city of Fort Worth would want to bake something containing pumpkin. Really?

Like a maniac I headed back to the baking isle, tossed the brown sugar back on the shelf and after questioning my sanity for about 1.5 seconds headed to Tom Thumb, the second closest grocery store from out house. I got there about 9:05 and rushed inside, then realized people were probably looking at me like I was crazy, after all who needs to run to the pumpkin when there's only 5 other people in the store. It's not like there was going to be a stampede for the pumpkin. One miracle and a self check out later and we were in business.

I've never mixed dough so quickly in my life, and let me say that yeast works a lot faster when you're not waiting for it to work. But, at 10:30 I was in bed with pumpkin cinnamon rolls in the refrigerator waiting to be baked. I don't know what was so important about the bloody rolls, but there's a certain satisfaction knowing that I won