Happy Halloween!

This year for Halloween, I decided to go as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.  Apparently I was Dorothy once before when I was very young.  However, I do not remember  it and that dress wouldn't fit me anymore anyway, so I made a new one and I was happy with how it turned out.  I also made my own ruby slippers (and I am still finding sequins all over the house).

Saturday morning my family and I ran in the Spook Sprint Fun Run, a 5K benefiting adoption.  I ran in costume (because why not?), but I didn't want to run in my ruby slippers so I "adapted" my running shoes for the occasion.

Here is the family after the run:

Saturday night was spent at my dear "Daddy" Marc Jensen's house in Preston.  Marc gets way into Halloween, decorating his yard with a doomsday theme and dressing as the Grim Reaper to hand out candy to the littles.  So it is a tradition among some of my friends to spend the night there, watching Marc scare children and then having dinner and chatting or watching a movie.  This year RoseAnne and I made some delicious soups and rolls.  Here I am in my apron:

Kassie and Brett playing with Furd, Marc's faithful skeletal friend:

Kassie definitely won the costume contest of the night.  She came as Richard!  Can you tell which is which?

Then on Sunday, instead of continuing with our traditional alphabetical movie night, we took advantage of the fact that it was actually Halloween and had a Halloween movie night (we watched Clue and Rear Window) and costume party, complete with spooky treats like crushed bones and human fingers!

Me with Mariska as Jane Bennett (I went as Elizabeth Bennett in that same dress last year, cool huh?)

Stephanie and Adrienne came as Sick and Tired  :)

Scott made this awesome no-strings-attached Pinocchio costume:

Allison as the Greek Goddess Artemis

Chuck as a Fish and Robert as the Karate Kid (which was one of our "K" movies...)

And the whole A-Z Movie Group (Well, some of us, anyway...)

All in all, a pretty fantastic Halloween!

Pumpkin Walk

For those of you who have never spent a Halloween in Cache Valley, every year we have this awesome event called the Pumpkin Walk.  It is held free-of-charge in a park in North Logan, and schools, businesses, families, and other groups create scenes from movies, television, books, and the like using mostly harvest vegetables.  It’s pretty much cool.  Here are some of my favorite scenes from the Pumpkin Walk this year, which had an animated theme:

The Flintstones

Partly Cloudy

SpongeBob Squarepants

Popeye

They also have TONS of wooden cutouts so you can pose as your favorite characters.  We had a little bit too much fun with them...

 And here is a shot of Austin, Mom, Braxton, and Shannon before it was dark and cold.

They say HOORAY for the Pumpkin Walk!

A Flood of Family Fun!

It was Sunday, October 24^th.  It had been raining off and on all day and for most of the day before.  It was about 10:30 PM and while Mom, Grandma and Grandpa had already gone to bed, my siblings and were in the basement watching Raising Arizona.  A little while into the movie, I kept thinking I could hear dripping noises, but when I asked Shannon and Austin about it they said they couldn’t hear anything, so I didn’t check right away.  A few minutes later I could swear the dripping was getting worse, so I followed the noise into our downstairs kitchen to check it out.  The rain outside had mostly filled our windowsill (two or three feet deep, since we have a daylight basement) and water was streaming through the bottom and sides of the window pane.  I sent Shannon for some towels, but they didn’t do much good.  We would put them on the window sill to catch the water as it leaked through, and after just a few seconds the towels would be completely soaked; so heavy with water that they would just fall off the window sill.

 

By this time my mom heard the commotion and came into the kitchen with us and we all soon realized that not only were the towels insufficient for cleaning up the water that had already flooded into the kitchen, but they definitely weren’t helping slow the flow from the outside in.  So my mom went to work sucking the kitchen dry with the Shop Vac and Shannon and Austin and I headed outside to try to empty out the window sill.

We went to work filling buckets and dumping them out – first onto the lawn and then, when the lawn started collecting giant puddles, into the street.

 

 

All that work made Shannon thirsty….

 

Soon the kitchen was all Shop Vac’d and Mom came outside and stuck the vacuum hose into the window well, and even with the vacuum running and the three of us kids continuing to work with the buckets, the rain was so torrential that it seemed we were hardly getting anywhere.

 

There were huge puddles developing on the lawn, the walkway, and in the garden, and we found a sinkhole in the flowerbed right in front of the window well, which may have contributed to the mass amounts of water leaking in.

 

Grandma and Grandpa got in on the action then as well.  Grandma brought out more light and helped us to organize ourselves in all the chaos, and Grandpa redirected the drainage pipes from the roof so they were facing as far away from the window as possible.

While Mom and I kept working on emptying the window sill, Grandpa, Austin, and Shannon went into the backyard and filled the wheelbarrow with dirt to refill the sinkhole and try to prevent further water leakage.

After the window sill was almost completely dry and the sinkhole pretty well filled in, my mom and my grandpa used a tarp and a shovel and some big rocks to build a little tent over the window sill to keep as much of the continuing rain storm out as possible.

 

Despite the cold and the wet (so cold and so wet, in fact, that my mom and I had to go inside halfway through the project and change into dry clothes!) and the late hour, we managed to have a fair share of good old Burgess/Wright family fun!

Picnic + Bountiful + Soccer = Fun Day!

So I have a bunch of really great friends, and October 19 was one of those days when I got to enjoy the company of some of the best of them in some very fun circumstances!

That Tuesday morning, I packed myself and a few of my belongings into the good car and sang along with my Glee soundtrack all the way to the magical land of Clearfield, UT.  There I met with my Terrace Plaza theater friends, Andrea Scanlon and Annie Ferrin, and their youngest children, Kyra and Xander (the older kids were in school of course), for a lunch picnic in the park.  We chatted and caught up on each other's lives and watched Kyra drag random strangers around the playground, calling one man "Daddy" and asking to be pushed on the swings or helped down the slide.  It was a lovely couple of hours and I always love getting to spend time with these amazing ladies and their beautiful kids!

After the picnic, I had a couple of hours to kill, so I called my best friend from high school, Melissa Cannon Hislop and asked if I could come down and visit with her for a while.  She and her husband, Sammy, and their one-year-old daughter, Lucy, moved from Cedar City to Bountiful at the beginning of the summer and I hadn't yet had a chance to visit her there, so I was excited to see her new-to-me apartment - and her and Lucy!  We had a nice visit and Lucy wasn't too shy of me and I got to see all of Missy's cute crafts, my favorite of which was her candy corn tree (which can be seen here:  Missy's Cunning Craftiness).  I really miss having Missy right across the street to entertain me and to be dragged around on all my misadventures, but she is such a great wife and mom and homemaker that I guess I can't be too upset about it.  (Also I look forward to all her crafty, homemaking help when I have a house and husband of my own!)

The final event of my awesome fun day was my very first Real Salt Lake soccer game with my friend, Marshall Stoddard.  Marshall buys season tickets and has invited me a few times to accompany him, but this was the first day I was able to come and I was so excited!  We met in Ogden and Marshall drove us down to Draper where we ate dinner at Chipotle and then went to the stadium.  We sat down and this was what I could see:

And Marshall said in a sarcastically apologetic tone, "These aren't bad seats, are they?"  Haha Marshall, no, they are definitely not bad seats.

I was a professional soccer virgin, because my soccer experiences as a child were not fantastic, to say the least.  When I was on the U-10 Hillcrest Strikers soccer team in the second grade I spent most of my time on the field running away from the not-so-high flying ball with my arms covering my head.  And in middle school, every time we played line soccer I would somehow manage to get a ball kicked right at my face or smack into my stomach.  So I had kind of a bad taste in my mouth when it came to soccer, and flat-out refused to watch the World Cup with Melissa in our senior year.  However, I am at a point in my life when I am excited to try new things and determined to be open-minded and fearless.  So I went to the Real game not only with no trepidation, but with an adequate amount of enthusiasm.

The game was actually awesome.  It was weird getting used to a professional sport where very little of the action was replayed over the loudspeakers.   Despite the music and shouts from the crowd, it seemed so quiet without commentary that it felt at times like I was watching the little men kicking around the tiny ball on a TV on mute or something.  And Marshall had to keep explaining what was happening in the game.  But I caught on okay, I think, and I really enjoyed myself.

That night the Real played against a Mexican team, the Cruz Azul (Blue Crosses), and when their supporters kept shouting "Azul, azul, azul!" the Real supporters around us made comments about all the sneezing.  And of course, there were many choruses of "Ole, ole, ole, ole!  Real Salt Lake!" especially after the Real scored goals.  Despite a lack of action in the first half of the game, there was still plenty to watch and keep my interest.  All of the goals in  the entire game were scored in a period of about a half an hour, and the game ended 3-1 in favor of the Real!  Hooray!  Thanks Marshall for the ticket and I would love to go again sometime!

P.S.  I think I could do a pretty darn good job of being a soccer announcer, since I can hold out "GOAL!" like nobody's business.  I'm probably not at a professional level just yet, but maybe when I am a soccer mom I can give it a try!

Pancakes

What is it about pancakes?  Why can't I ever make them pretty?  Sure, they always taste fine, in fact pretty darn good if I use a from-scratch recipe such as my favorite, lemon blueberry cornmeal pancakes with maple-berry topping.  But no matter how many times I alter the heat of the pan or the viscosity of the batter, it seems that my pancakes are always ugly.  They are always too dark or too light or they have weird ring patterns or blotchy spots or some yucky combination of these things.  And no pancake is ever like another, since the pan never seems to stay at the same temperature long enough to even make both sides of the same pancake match!


Earlier this week I watched the movie Matilda for the first time in many years.  Remember that scene where she is about four years old and making pancakes for herself for breakfast?  When she first turns them over, they are a little burned, and then as she flips them up in the air and onto the plate they are perfectly golden brown on both sides.  When I was younger I assumed that the sudden pancake perfection was a purposeful tribute to Matilda's "powers", but as I re-watched the film I thought that perhaps it was simply an inconsistency in filming that nobody worried about in editing because, hey, Matilda has magical powers so any of those little blips could basically be overlooked.  Whether the transformation of the pancakes was purposeful or not, I find myself tremendously jealous of Matilda's ability to make a previously ugly pancake perfect and beautiful.

 And restaurants.  I mean, how do they do it?  I have never had an ugly pancake at IHOP or Village Inn.  What's the deal?  Even at McDonald's the pancakes are pretty.  I think that I am capable of preparing pancakes that are better-tasting and better for me than those in the restaurants.  But mine are ugly, and it's aggravating.  Visual presentation is just such an important factor in preparing a good meal.  Everything that is pretty tastes better.


Can anyone teach me how to make pancakes that are beautiful as well as delicious?  Because that would seriously improve my quality of life.

Welcome!

Greetings, friends, family, associates, and other readers.  Welcome to by blog!  This page will hopefully keep all y'all informed of the comings and goings in my life and will allow you to share in my joy and laughter, tears and sorrow, and everything in between.  And "if [it brings] a little joy into your humdrum lives, it makes [me] feel as though [my blogging] ain't been in vain for nothin'. Bless you all."

P.S.  Sorry about the lame "welcome post."  Don't feel bad, I got bored reading it too.