Why I Oughta...

And...belly laughs all around.  Hot pockets, too.

I've written a few times about Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party down at the Magic Kingdom in the past.  In 2015, I posted a few photos of Halloween pins and a video of the Sanderson Sisters .  I also posted a photo of a Christmas ornament - yes Christmas - that was a Mickey-shaped pumpkin .  And, finally, that same year, we picked up a few 'limited edition' pins from the party and I shared a photo of those .    This year, I'll place this year's map here in my diary to remember what things looked like and where the trick-or-treat locations were located.  You can see those below. This isn't the first Parks map that I've posted.  You can see more from Disneyland/Sea Tokyo here .  And the full archive of maps-specific posts here . Boo to you!

Just like my recent trip to the Bay Area , I spent all of about 24 hours in New York recently.  The entirety of it between Newark Airport and offices and a hotel in SoHo.  That photo above, is the view I had for an afternoon, which was pretty nice.  Back when I was working at Google and would occasionally travel to NYC, I never got below 15th Street, so this is a whole new territory for me being Downtown and all.  How cosmopolitan, eh?!?!

We marked the evening fall temperatures lately with the maiden fire in our new fireplace recently.  I posted photos of this fireplace being built earlier on the blog back in March of this year, so you can see the location of this fireplace in that post.  I've posted a bunch of pieces on our various fireplaces over time that you can check out here .   We loved our outdoor fireplace back in Elmhurst - especially during the fall - when we broke out the s'mores, so I'm thinking we'll get a lot of use out of this new one.  Here's a photo from seven years ago showing the kid's cousins toasting their marshmallows .  We didn't do any toasting this time, but there's still plenty of fall left, right?  And in this one?  We have a gas burner, so I don't have to round up kindling and work to get it started each time. 

I was visiting an Edelman office recently and sat down at someone's desk who happened to be traveling that day.  There wasn't much 'cubicle decor' as it were, but there was this mug.  And it is awfully sweet, isn't it?  The positivity of the message stuck with me all day:  Be the Leslie Knope of whatever you do. Don't mind if I do.

I went out in the #newoldbackyard to check on some of the trees we had planted this year recently and was surprised that MOST of them were doing just fine despite the almost drought-like conditions.  But the Dawn Redwood seems like it might be in trouble.  That's it above where you can see a lot of brown, yellow'd needles that have dropped off.  But, many of the 'tips' of the limbs are still green - see the photo below: See the green needles on the far edges of the limbs?  So, there is *some* life in this thing, but did the drought get to the rest?   I've seen another of these (or perhaps it was a Bald Cypress??) in the neighborhood that had all of it's needles drop, so while I'm concerned that the drought affected my dear Dawn Redwood, maybe it will be fine?  I'll be watching this one bud out early in the Spring and will - of course - report back on it here.

Back in August of 2016 (14 months ago), I posted a photo of my office succulent .  You should go look at that photo here to get a sense for the growth.  Above, you see a photo of what it looks like today.  It has gone, literally, berzerk.  This started from some cuttings of a co-worker's succulent and now has clearly outgrown it's pot.  Not to mention the soil has likely outlived its useful life, right?  I'm going to bring in a few little pots and some succulent soil and see if I can again replicate the success I had with cuttings on this original version to grow a few more.  If you look closely, you'll see that there are quite a few little buds on the main stems that I can cleave off and use to start entirely new plants, I think.