Today Ruby brought a baggie full of M&M's home from school. In her class, they get to count as many M&M's as they can, up to 100, and all the M&M's they count they get to keep and take home. I think they do it about once a month. They asked the parents to donate a bag of M&M's for it, and I bought a big bag from Costco, hoping that my investment would yield a good return.

Ruby counted to 100, and brought home 100 M&M's. I asked her if that means she is now in the "100 Club". She said she is, but that she's the only one. They have a poster in the class with the names of the kids in the 100 Club.

Yay for my smart little Ruby-dee!

Pumpkin Cupcakes

I made pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. I just felt like some, so I made some. From scratch. They were really good. I used Martha Stewart's recipe for both the cake and the frosting, but I should tell you that her cream cheese frosting is basically the same as my mother-in-law's cream cheese frosting (which their family calls sour cream frosting).

In any case, everything turned out very nicely. The recipe said it made 18 cupcakes, but I got 31 out of it. Some of them were a little low, but I still got a lot more than it said I would. I don't really need 31 cupcakes. I gave some to my neighbor.

Here's a link to the cupcake recipe. And a link to the frosting.

Trees

So, we have three trees in our yard that are in various states of dying. One is completely dead (bark peeling off and all), one has one branch left that still produces leaves, and the other one is starting to go. Mistletoe killed/is killing them. We need to have them removed. Unfortunately those are all the three big shade trees in the back yard. After they're gone, we'll just have the redwoods in the back, and they don't shade the house. Thankfully, mistletoe doesn't grow on redwoods. We have one maple tree in the front yard that is growing very nicely, but we just planted it a year or two ago, so it's only about 8 feet tall.

We had a guy come out and give an estimate yesterday. Having trees removed is expensive. We're looking at around $3400 for all three including stump removal. The one that is completely dead is fortunately the cheapest one to remove, though the guy offered a discount to do all of them. Two of them are tall enough and in places where they could possibly hit three different houses, one being ours. The other one could land on our house, but if it went toward the neighbor's house on that side, only the lighter top branches would hit.

Ah well. Once they're gone we won't have a 30-40 foot alder tree dumping leaves, cones AND catkins into the pool every fall and winter. And the tree that's shading one of my garden boxes will be gone, too. We'll also have more space for more garden boxes. And fruit trees. So, while I'm sad to lose the shade in the backyard (right now, our patio is so nice and shady in the hot afternoons, it's a nice place to sit and feel the breeze and our swingset is in shade most of the day), I'll be glad to not have so much clean up to deal with and to have more garden space. We're going to replace one of the shade trees with a broadleaf evergreen so the patio will eventually get some shade but it won't drop leaves into the pool. The tree by the garden won't get replaced, but we might put some dwarf fruit trees over near there to make sort of a border between the yard and the garden. I might move my potted cold-sensitive trees over there so they'll be near the watering lines.

John's trying to figure out where all the watering lines connect so we can get the garden on the automatic watering schedule. There are pipes that end by the garden, but there's no water going to them.

So much to do, so little time to actually work on it.

Rise and Shout. . .

. . .the Cougars are out!!!

#20 BYU beat #3 Oklahoma, 14-13.