OCT 6 UPDATE: Pumpkin picking

I took Sofia and Erik to a pumpkin picking event on Sunday afternoon. Sofia got a nice small pumpkin to take home, as did Erik, and the organizers had set up different harvest scenes all around so you could take pictures of the kids. This is the best photo we got (taken by my sister):

Yes -- smiling mom, smiling daughter ... screaming son. Ah, well.

Dave was working at home for the afternoon and finally finished insulating that addition. Yay! I was getting sick of writing about that, since there's no point in taking pictures of a dark crawlspace. But it needed to be done, and now it's done.

I think the next thing is the stairs into the house -- that also needs to be done before the ground freezes. Then it's back to the wiring.

One thing we need to decide before we do the wiring is what our alternate heating system is going to be. Dave's been looking into an electric heat pump, the kind that apparently work in a house without ductwork. I don't know much about it at this point.

I've been trying to talk Dave into putting in something like WarmTiles under the tiles we are going to install in the dining room and kitchen. He says the dining room at least should be the warmest room in the house, really, with the woodstove there ... but I say heat goes up, and the floor is likely to be cold, even if the rest of the room is warm. Hopefully the tiles will be warmed by the sun in our passive solar design, but the sun doesn't shine all the time. (I looked up how many days of sun we can expect in South Dakota in November: 3.)

And I need to get back to the bathroom discussion at some point. I've gotten lots of suggestions now for the window/wall/nook problem! Some of them won't work, through no fault of the suggestion givers, but because of problems with the layout I apparently didn't explain very well.

But I'll save that for another post. For now, here are a few more random pictures:

... This is Sofia's latest pastime -- I hear, "Mommy, can I hold Erik?" several times a day. I don't mind -- it lasts a few minutes, long enough that I can stir the soup or run to the bathroom or whatever.


... And you get to see this one just because it made me laugh. What a look!


Some of the last produce from the garden: marigolds, eggplant, tomatoes, and would-you-look-at-the-girth-of-those carrots! I was impressed.

... Of course, that's nothing compared to the squash we're producing. I had one photo in the blog before; I'll have to get out to the garden and grab another photo of the "squash that got away."