Of Mice and Melon

There is much to catch you up on and so little precious time, so this blog post is essentially an update on a variety of things going on in our life.

Today is apt opportunity to provide a summary of our summer garden as we had our first snowfall here in Pittsburgh. Several weeks ago, the majority of our plants stopped producing (largely because the bees had left, I think) and most of the tomatoes were no longer ripening because it was getting cold. But that's not to say that the end of the season was uneventful. Not at all, indeed!

One day I went out there and almost walked through one of the largest, most wonderfully designed spiderwebs.... which would have been a lot more wonderful if it didn't have a ginormous spider in it - a feisty pregnant one at that. So what did I do? I did what my daring younger brother would do - I caught it and put it in a jar. Inside the jar, it spun a whole new web made this huge mothball sort of thing (full of eggs I presume) and just sat there. I kind of forgot all about it, and about two weeks later, at the beckoning of my wife for fear that they would get loose, hatch, and spread through the house, I went to dispose of the spider and throw its remains outside. It was STILL alive. I couldn't believe. Craziness.

Then there was the mystery plant that grew in our compost pile. It turned out to be a musk melon that fit in the palm of my hand. I picked it and cut it up to try it, but... well, needless to say there's a reason why they're supposed to be grown in tropical areas - it would have been three times in size and tasted ten times better!

Then there was the picking of our garden of what was left of the green tomatoes before the first frost. I told Amber I would do it, thinking I would get it done over the next weekend, only to find out that it was supposed to get below freezing the day I promised to do it! So, there I was out there after dark with a work lamp hung from my trash can wandering through our garden looking for what was left of our tomato crop. Anyone want some fried green tomatoes? Actually, we've put them in our basement in cardboard boxes and they are still changing color, which is a great thing!

In other news, we discovered this past weekend that we have/had a mouse. One morning we got up to find claw marks through a granola wrapper on the counter of our kitchen and half of the granola bar had been consumed. Uck. So, I checked under the stove behind the bottom drawer where I had long ago set a mouse trap and knew they had been known to congregate. I found mouse turds and a dead mouse in trap... which looked like it had been there for more than a few days. Even more Uck. Not sure if we've solved the problem, but we did a lot of major cleaning in the kitchen on Sunday afternoon and set up another trap.

And still in other, more pleasant, news this week I felt our baby boy kick for the first time! That's right, he's only four months old and he's already learning to declare his presence. It is, however, only the slightest tap and you really have to know what you're looking for. Amber said she was driving a couple days ago, drinking juice and listening to Journey on the radio and the kid was going nuts. Hilarious. So he's either a sugar addict or is going to have a crush on 80s music.