Looks like you 3 ladies were ready for the ball! Hope you had a great time! Jan

I had just finished posting to this and we had a power surge and lost all of it. So I'll try again. Karen, I'll keep you posted on Joe and the little Spooks. Thanks for your comments on the Ghost. OA, I've always decorated DGD swing set and play house for Christmas. This year I used it for Halloween too since it's easy access to power. Dream, thanks and glad you like Joe. The carving on him is amazing. Jeanne, thanks for all the sweet comments. We live at the bottom of the Mission Mtns. Those are hills in the scarecrow picture and are our view in the back. I'll show you a moutain shot we see from the front in June. They are beautiful most of the year. Lynn, thanks and if you want to come trick or treating now you're very Welcome. Our place is right next to the highway so we always try to light things up pretty well for the Holidays. We've done so much in the past and everyone has grown to expect it so we usually have most of the yard decorated. This year only the front and side. Frou, we generally get up to 150 little gobblins at our home. They have started doing Halloween parties at some of the Club Houses so it has cut back to 100 a couple years. DH grew up here and I came as a 1st grader so we're not stragers and most parents come in with their children just to say "Hi". your sweet comments on this post. Punk

I had fewer kids than usual...it seems that since the era of the razor blades in the apples and the pins in candy, organizations around town have started "safer" ways for kids to gather a boat load of candy....and taken all the fun out of the holiday! There was a "schedule"....the hospital offered candy for certain hours, and the nursing homes and "senior complexes" for other hours and then the merchants downtown set out tables and gave candy and various churches offered "Trunk or Treat" where members decorated their car trunk and parked in the church parking lot and gave candy to passing kids..... So that when all that was over, not many had the desire to knock on my door and show their cute painted faces.....sad!! I remember my mother taking me to Bambi when it first came out....scared the bejabbers out of me!! Forest Fire!! Orphaned baby deer...Oh my...I remember hiding under the seat in the movie! Also Dumbo scared me a bit.....and I remember having nightmares about Abbot and Costello Haunt a House... For sure Snow White was scary....but not nearly as scary as Bambi!!!!

Horse herb is one of several plants that seem to struggle where I want them and thrive where I don't. It has spread through the local park in spots too shady for the Bermuda where it looks good even after the weekly cut. I had started letting it grow into and through our new sun beds this year as Sally Wasowski described doing in her north Texas yard, but found with a few hours of sun it can smother things that stay much less than a foot tall for any significant portion of the growing season. Somewhere in the following photo are a blue grama, gaura, and four-nerve daisy that need to be uncovered if still alive. This is one season of growth off of a well established mother plant that was about 3 ft beyond the frame. I like it, just haven't figured out how to live with it in the garden. It isn't reliably dense as a lawn alternative in heavy shade (with rabbits, anyway). Only place it has not been too aggressive or too sparse is with 1 or 2 hours of sun in an idle corner where we're eventually going to build a shed. Think I'm going to try to remove it everywhere else on the lot and apply a pre-emergent in the spring to keep its seeds from germinating under the cover of the larger plants.