Halloween let down

Halloween in Des Moines is straight up bizarre. There are very set times for trick or treating and they almost never fall on actual Halloween. They call it Beggars' Night and it looks like this:

• It's almost never on actual Halloween, which is a definite buzzkill. For us, it was last night.
• Sanctioned trick or treating lasts from 6-8pm ONLY. No surprise high schoolers in masks at 10:00 'round these parts. 
• Kids expect to tell jokes. (Really, this one doesn't bother me because I remember always having a joke ready for those few stubborn old folks who wouldn't give me a Reese's without hearing a lame knock-knock joke first)

No matter how long I've been here or how much I flat-out love this place, nothing about Beggars' Night will ever make sense to me. 

Add to this cultural conundrum the fact that I live on what I can only assume is the least fun street in the entire city. It's a long, long block and I can see about seven houses in either direction. You know how many had our lights on last night? Three. Three measly little houses catering to just seven groups of kids.

Bah humbug, Des Moines!

Here at Bigger, Better, Best, we refuse to go down without a fight and we shall keep our Halloween humor til the last.

 28.5% of the kids who came to out door declared a definite desire to say hi to the kitties, which was not met with matched enthusiasm by the cats.

Our jacks!

 We made spooky scene with a giant spider and paper bats that flew around on fishing line. They looked pretty awesome in the wind, but where tough to capture in pictures.

Dracula showing off his teeth.

I've got to know: Is your Des Moines neighborhood so lonely at Halloween? Out-of-towners: can I sell you 7 lbs of candy for real cheap?

Cookies you make when it's autumnal out-of-doors

First off, thank you readers for your thoughtful words on my last post. You are just the sweetest.

Second off, and speaking of sweets, I need to share with you this recipe, which came my way via Pinterest, which is the source of far too many outlandishly amazing fusion dessert ideas for this gal.

For instance: caramel apple cookies. Oh!

I tried unsuccessfully with three cookies to take photos beautiful enough to show you how delectable these gems are. My low success rate is due in part to my heavy reliance on a camera phone as well as the fact that, in actual life, these cookies looked too good to be merely admired and so I showed them the proper respect and ate them post haste.

For a more accurate visual account, please refer to the original recipe post, linked above in Paragraph Two.

For a more accurate digestive account, please make these cookies, microwave them for 8 seconds before consuming and report back.

Your urgency in this matter is appreciated.

A life well satisfied

Last weekend, my family gathered in a hospital room to be with our Nana, who had been sick for a while and late last week, took a turn for the worst. We sat with her, ate pizza, played Sequence and told stories. Sunday afternoon, Hubs and I began the drive from St. Louis back to Des Moines. About half way there, my sister called and asked me to turn around. I did and about 30 minutes after I got back in the hospital room and just one inning shy of the Cardinals securing their spot in the World Series, Nana passed away peacefully.

It's been a hard week with lots of little logistical frustrations made worse by our raw grief and coming to terms with what happened that night. But, through the sadness, we've been able to see the small signs and signals which remind us that someone is most definitely looking out for our family. It began with me spotting a billboard on my drive down for a podunk little airline - the same one that would later fly me over the hospital and return me to my family at the exact right time. It continued with a "Welcome" balloon given to Nana when she moved into a nursing home a few weeks ago rushing out of the car and sailing away as my Mom arrived at the church for the funeral. It happened again at the cemetery, where we arrived early, allowing my sister to be near her phone when, at the originally scheduled burial time, she got a phone call with good news about a potential job.

Small though these are, they have given me and my family the peace we need to move forward. We'd known this was coming for a while; Nana was diagnosed with cancer about 18 months ago. Thanks to her medicine and the care my Mom gave her, she was able to enjoy much of that time. If you look at her obituary, you'll see we asked for donations for the Chronic Disease Fund in lieu of flowers. That's the non-profit that paid for her meds, which was one of the greatest gifts we could have received. They help with medical costs for all kinds of chronic diseases: cancer, MS, heart failure, ALS and more. The treatments for these diseases can be incredibly expensive and can wipe out savings in just a few months in some cases.

Now, go send your Nana a letter. If she's anything like mine, she'll stash it away with all the others. Nanas are excellent stashers, as well as superb readers, skilled free-drink-getters, perfect knowers of current events, really good salad connosuiers and irreplaceable encouragers.

Wherein smartphones save my basement

I've lived in a different town from my parents for the past ten years. In that decade, I've taken up residence in four different places in Des Moines and it seems like every time they visit, we take on some tiny project that invariably requires a trip to Ace Hardware. From fixing a broken futon sophomore year to getting nails to hand pictures in our first house, family time is also fixin' time.

(Fun Fact: I'd totally forgotten that Hubs clued my dad into his plans to ask me to marry him at our neighborhood Ace. If our life was a movie, that scene would have had some definite foreshadowing music.)


This time, we were hellbent on hanging our TV on the swivel mount we bought back in February, when a finished basement was but a distant dream. The mount itself weighs about 80 pounds since we wanted the fully swivle-able kind, so we had to do some serious drilling.

The sight of all these half inch holes in the drywall I had so lovingly hung, mudded and sanded broke my poor little heart.

It was here that we first ran into problems. Having wired the basement on our own, we kind of knew where wires were. We had placed them behind thick metal stoppers under studs so we wouldn't do something stupid like drill a half inch hole into a wire and have to re-electrify the entire basement and heavily self-medicate for the next six months.

So when that middle hole was blocked by metal, we got nervous. We knew the metal plates where much larger than the area where there was actual wire (or in this case, cable), so we needed to figure out if the wire was truly behind where the hole needed to be or if we were good to just bust through the metal since that particular half inch wasn't protecting anything.

Problem was, it was really hard to see through the tiny cable box opening to see down inside the wall. 

Luckily, Dad saved the day with his idea to angle his phone in the cable opening and snap a few photos.

Just so you know, we tried all four of our phones, hoping for better angles and it seems my Mom's Motorola was the skinniest and therefore best suited to getting the perfect shot. Just in case you ever find yourself in this exact same situation, which I'm sure you will.

Here is the inside of our basement wall in all its glory.

We were safe! The hole missed the cable by about an inch and a half, so we kept on keepin' on.

Good job, guys!

Once we got that figured out, it was a group effort to get the bracket mounted and then place the TV, but now we have a bar-worthy TV set up.

The entertainment stand is now looking pretty naked without that honkin' TV sitting on it, so I'm on the prowl for something cute to jazz it up. I'm thinking seasonal crafty-things would be good, but I haven't seen anything that slays me just yet. 

Agree or disagree: hanging TVs is a terrifying experience?

The $5 fix

With my dear and darling Ma and Pa visiting us this weekend, I decided to get my tookus in gear and fix up the woebegone wall I shared last week. The fact that I scored three $1.47 frames from a Target clearance rack also helped.

Better, right? I'm no professional, but I see vast improvement and the darker frames add good balance and I'm pretty sold on them because they required no painting and were ca-ra-ra-ra-zy cheap. This is what we in the decorating world call "justifying."

We've got a nice shot from our first anniversary outing to Russian River Brewery.

The best fortune ever written, placed on some scrapbooking paper from the Hob Lob.

It says "You are the greatest in the world!" and it makes me quite happy.

I learned while we were engaged that if you send the President a wedding invite, he will send you a nice congratulatory card. I framed ours because it seems so quaint and like something grannies would do.

Yes, these are all camera-phone pictures taken in the dead of night. I not only never claimed to be a decorator, I also never claimed to be a photographer or person with enough patience to find the camera and wait for daylight.

Not bad for a $5 project, right?

Dirty Little Secret

For as much as I blather on and on about doing awesome kitchen things like making my own cheese and stockpiling homemade cinnamon rolls, I'm actually a sad little mess when it comes to making main dishes on my own. That's Hubs' job. I'll help here and there, but the concept and execution is just not my gift.

True fact: I have ruined the following dishes in my culinary lifetime (in chronological order): Pop Tarts, Kraft mac and cheese, instant mashed potatoes, couscous, all manner of chicken dishes, tuna salad,breakfast-for-dinner, etc. My epic kitchen failures far out way my triumphs, but I choose to think those who love me find this endearing and good for their waist-lines.

This week, Hubs decided to play soccer with fellow science folk after work, which meant I was - at the last minute - left to my own devices in the kitchen.

Here's how it went down, internal monologue style:

(looking through pantry and fridge, calm as all get out) Hmm. Seems like Hubs won't be home for a while. It'd be so nice of me to have something at least started so he can finish cooking this dinner. Because surely he'll be home soon and I won't have to actually think up and make an entire dinner. Surely!

(I find a giant bag of rice) Oh! We never make rice, even though we buy rice like hoarders. I'll start some rice.

Rice and (look in the fridge) green onions? carrots? frozen veggies? bacon? No, That doesn't even sound right. Let's try the old freezer and see what happens.

(sneaky peeky in the freezer) Chicken! Rice and chicken - that's a real thing. Hmm. Rice and chicken and bacon? No. No. Get off the bacon train. Rice and garden tomatoes? Perhappppps. Oh, but self! How's about some kind of southwestern chicken bake! We have gross condensed cream of chicken soup in the back of the pantry. This sounds familiar! This might become food!

(Google how to thaw a chicken, make sure I use the USDA regulations and not some shady blogger's tips)

(Google "southwestern chicken and rice bake" because if that doesn't sound like real food real people in real kitchens make, I don't know what does. Find this.) Get crackin'!

And so I followed the recipe and made dinner. And it was ready right as Hubs got home. And everyone liked it and it was officially added to the list of things we can eat for dinner. And I spent the rest of the night basking in the glow of main dish success.

And that is the story of how I made my very first dinner for poor old Hubs since we got married in 2009.

The end.

In which perfection shockingly alludes me

I've had this little hall mirror since 2004. It was purchased for less than $5 at Burlington Coat Factory in an effort to spruce up my crumbly sad college house.

Here is my wee little dark mirror, circa 2009. Waaay back before the new windows and back when two unruly felines had yet to destroy the upholstery on my green chair.

After living with the dark mirror for seven years, I got the itch. It was time to shake things up with my little discount store mirror and the only kind of excitement I could bring to the table was a pale gray paint left over from an old project.

This chip has been there as long as I can recall. It was likely earned during a legendary house party. 

 Taping mirrors always sucks because you I can never get a crisp line. If you look closely, you can always tell I just slapped some lipstick on a pig of a mirror. Nevertheless, I tried to wedge my tape corners down with a screwdriver and look of serious concentration.

Painting time! 

I failed to realize just how sticky-outtie the designs were until I was really trying to get in there with my brush.

I almost left the mirror in this stage of shabby chicness after just two coats of paint before realizing shabby chic has no place in my home. Mostly because the shabby rings just too true.

So I rolled on a third coat and called it good.

Today, the mirror hangs where it always had and I've got to admit - I'm underwhelmed.

 Missed a spot or two.

It just disappears.

Be honest, aren't you underwhelmed, too? It's just too light and airy that it fades away. I'm hoping that once I get my act together and paint all that trim white, it will be a little better.

Maybe I just need to gallery wall this shizzle and get my pops of boldness that way. What say ye?

This ye says that between my lame painting and having reflected hundreds of hard-partying accountants and pharmacists: That poor mirror has been through the ringer.

What paint mistakes have you made lately?