Trick-or-treat! Smell my... leaves?

Happy Halloween! We bought a total of four bags of candy, perhaps a little more, and we only gave away maybe ten pieces total. So much for trick-or-treaters! We had maybe four separate doorbell rings, each doorbell ring bringing about two trick-or-treaters. We had three Dorothies (Wizard of Oz kind), one dark angel, one rapper, one robot thing, and one little girl in an old-fashioned-typed dress. I thought she said she was a midwife, but that can't be right. Anyway, each of these little kids only took one or two pieces of candy each. What's up with greed these days? If I were a kid I'd have stuck my hand in the candy bucket and taken as many pieces as my fat little hand could have held. Parents today parent too well, I guess. Needless to say, we spent a rather uneventful Halloween night watching Ghost Hunters Live, eating (gross) Papa John's pizza, and stuffing ourselves silly with leftover candy. We still have most of our candy bucket left to eat. Please take it away from me... I never thought I'd say this, but I'm getting tired of candy.

So what else did we do this weekend? Raked leaves. Now here's a piece of advice when you're going to look at houses to buy - take careful note of how many trees either exist on your property or overhang onto your property and ask yourself if you really and truly want to deal with all those leaves each fall. We figured that our yard was small enough that we wouldn't really have to worry about too many leaves, but having a small yard really doesn't have anything to do with how many leaves you'll have. I raked only the front yard (and part of our street, actually), and filled five leaf bags. Here are a few photos from our leaf adventure:

This one is me dealing with the leaves in the street. Yes, I raked the street. I raked the street because we have a small, narrow street and a tree of ours was depositing leaves all on the side of the street in front of our house. At some point I'm sure the leaves would have overtaken the whole street. Rather than make our neighbors unhappy with our tree, I decided to rake the leaves. Raking the street just seems wrong somehow.

Here is a photo of all five of our leaf bags standing in front of the house, waiting to be collected for garbage day on Tuesday. Can I ask why leaf bags are made the way they are? It's very difficult to put leaves into them. I scoop up a pile of leaves using the two-rake method and I try to dump them into the opening in the bag, but half the leaves fall outside of the bag and the leaf bag gets full so fast. These bags confound me. Please, Creative Person, please design a new kind of leaf bag.

Moving on. This weekend also brought to an end the seasonal clothes-change project. All the summer clothes are now in bins in the attic, and the winter ones are now nicely put away and organized, as you'll notice in this picture of our closet. I had to post a photo of our closet because I just love that it is so neat and clean. Who doesn't love a clean closet? My closet was never clean as a kid, never organized. Now I don't think I could live without having my closet in this kind of shape. (This just proves that I've turned anal-retentive in my old age, doesn't it.) My parents' closets always looked like this. My mother's pants all hang neatly from pants hangers, her shirts are all nicely hanging on hangers. Her shoes are all at the bottom of her closet in her shoe box, the nicer ones still in the boxes in which she bought them. I was always impressed by her closet, and how I have one just like it.

And speaking of my parents, they celebrated today their 40th anniversary. Apparently the 40th anniversary is the ruby anniversary, but no rubies were had today. My mom and dad went to my sister's house for dinner and hung out with their grandchildren. Were flowers had? Not sure. Breakfast in bed? Not likely. For reasons I understand well they don't really do much celebrating of their anniversary, but it's good that they were treated to a nice evening out of the house and in the company of family. After all, two years after they were married they had my sister, so it's only fitting that they celebrate their wedding with her and her offspring. I'm sure the dinner was great, too - my brother-in-law makes a mean meal. So happy anniversary, Mom and Dad! Doug and I will be glad to host a 50th anniversary bash. For that one we can't let you let it pass unnoticed...