chipperAnnual Halloween shopping weekend in Roseville with my jr-high friend Natasha & her son Austin was fabulous as always...even better we made it over 2 days this time, since a mutual friend Jenny happened to be moving 5 minutes from my parents, so we got to pop over & see their new house too! Even though I was trying to restrain myself, I bought too much Halloween stuff as usual, but amazingly NOTHING at the JoAnn gigantic Costco-sized superstore. I bought out Wishing Well as usual, very proud my total was well less than $100 (heh!), and we even eventually succeeded in the day's ultimate mission of finding Austin a pirate pistol at Party City. We knew we were pretty early for Halloween shopping since it was the weekend just after Labor Day, but due to
blackwiidow's visit the following weekend then my Europe trip later, that was our only chance. Austin loved the sourdough pancakes I made saying "These are the best pancakes I've ever had!" High praise from a 6 year old... :)The week between was hectic as always seems to be...I wish one of these days work would slow down just slightly!...then I raced away Friday afternoon to pick up
blackwiidow from her hotel from her business trip, zoom over to Apple HQ to squeak into the company store before it closed, where she wanted to buy everything in sight, but amazingly did not buy the "I visited the mothership" shirt...haha! Apple was having one of their beer bashes to celebrate, so we had some munchies & chatted with mrmouse & hp_jenorama for quite awhile, not even making it to my house until about 8pm. We went over to downtown SJ just to walk around & see the city since we weren't hungry for dinner anymore, then back home chatting up a storm...even though we've emailed plenty & are on each other's LJ-friends lists so we keep up, this is the first time we've met in person & we got along famously! :)Saturday was sleeping in (finally!), then Brittahytta Bed & Breakfast was in full swing with homemade waffles with maple & Grand Marnier syrup
blackwiidow had brought me from her recent Montreal trip...so yummy! We took our time & got to Winchester Mystery House about 1:30 and took both tours, including the Behind the Scenes Tour I'd never seen before...very cool! blackwiidow had seen the house on some TV show when she was young, had no idea where in the USA it was, then when she told me about her business trip, I said that she of all people MUST see the spiderweb stained glass window! We did see them! The stained glass spiderweb is in the storage room since it was never installed, but one of the bathrooms has several square accent windows that are leaded glass spiderwebs. After our tours were over, we cruised through Santana Row a little, grabbed a smoothie to tide us over until dinner, then changed clothes, grabbed some jackets & took off with the Briata top down over Hwy 9 to the coast up Hwy 1 at sunset, with dinner at the Half Moon Bay Brewing Co. Tasty seafood, beautiful weather, even though it was a cloudless sunset still very pretty! Sunday we just had enough time to sleep in again, get everything packed up into the car, then hit Ross in case they had any other cute spiderweb dishtowels. We bought plenty more, she stuffed hers into her luggage, then she was off! blackwiidow, anytime Yahoo sends you out to HQ let me know so we can do this again! :)I am SO glad I had these weekends booked with friends, since without these visits to break up my constant stream of stress, I think I might have lost it completely by now... :) The weekdays in between were of course super-busy for work, then I'd either have choir rehearsal at night for the concert I would not be able to participate in (I hate feeling useless like that but oh well), or I was frantically laying brick on my patio with clamplights setup in the dark...but more on that project in a separate post! :)
