Beware of Pumpkins Bearing Gifts

So after yesterday's post which I actually researched (if you can call it that), I decided to take it easy today with a random assortment of things.  First, okay, I think that the pumpkin planter is stalking me.  Look what I saw yesterday:

They want $49.99 for that bad boy and frankly, it looks better in the picture than it did in real life (there is a first time for everything).  No kidding, it was kind of wilted and drooping.  Now, they didn't have to resort to cellophane the way I did, so I give them credit for that.  But, I came up with a reasonably good facsimile for about $10.00 worth of supplies that I bought from Whole Paycheck.  The markup on this has to be ridiculous.

I did end up picking up a few things, even though the price on the pumpkin planter probably should have warned me off.  Since I seem to be turning random things into planters, I bought two little orchids to put in an old brass (maybe?) bowl that belonged to Grandmother. (That's really what we called her.  Isn't that warm and fuzzy?)  Grandmother was not a baking cookies, cuddling of grandchildren kind of lady.  She had a townhouse in northern Virginia that was filled with all sorts of things that she collected on her travels.  No kidding, when I browse those curated sales on One King's Lane and Joss & Main I see dozens of items that could have been in her house.  She was just one of those people with an amazing design sense without even really trying.

So, I have one of her bowls:

 
Sorry, the composition on this picture sucks.  But it's a cool bowl, right?  Because I have a medical condition that compels me to keep dead plants, I also had this:

I'm seeking help for this problem, I promise.  So, this orchid died maybe a month ago and I've had the carcass sitting around in the basement.  The only reason it made it to the basement is that the cleaning people picked the wilted blossoms off the stem which succeeded in embarrassing me enough to take it out of the dining room and hide it.  The benefit of my condition is that I had a pot full of orchid dirt and wood chips that I could use for my project.  So, those are the two orchids that I purchased.  I tried to get something that I thought would fit, but we all know how that goes, so things were touch and go until I actually put them in the bowl.

This is an interesting thing.  When I got rid of the dead orchid, I dumped the dirt into the bowl.  It turns out that styrofoam peanuts comprise a pretty big part of the soil.  I guess that's for drainage?  I tried to get them on the bottom, under the dirt, but they seemed to keep wriggling out to the top.  Eventually, I tossed about half of them so that I could get the rest under the dirt.

Then, the moment of truth.  I put the orchids in the bowl and they fit perfectly!  Yay!  So, I'm one for three for spatial (not spacial, thanks Dad) problems in the last week.

The pants weren't necessarily very securely in the bowl, so I took a few of those river rocks that you can buy at Michael's and tried to kind of barricade them into the middle of the bowl.  Then, I also had some of those sheets of moss that you get at Michael's and I put that on top of the dirt, wood chips, and rocks just to neaten it up a bit.  (Clearly, I'm not a hand model, either!)

It looked to good that we took a walk outside for a little photo session which lasted until I couldn't figure out how to not cast my shadow over the plant while taking the picture.  We just got the deck washed, sealed, and stained which is, apparently, something that responsible homeowners do every couple of years.

So, pretty successful and about a 3 on the difficultly scale, which is my sweet spot.  I think Grandmother would be pretty proud.  She might even shake my hand.

I also wanted to share two random pictures that I snapped today when I was getting my haircut at Phipps Plaza.  Very fancy, I know.  It's the last holdover from my days as a high-powered lawyer.  Here we go:

 
Merry Christmas, y'all!  Oh, what's that you say?  It's not even Halloween?  Oh, my mistake.  I thought that because there are no less than three Christmas trees up at Phipps Plaza that the holiday season must be upon us.  Seriously, I get that they make beaucoup bucks with the whole Santa extravaganza at Phipps, but this is just beyond the pale.  It's mid-October.

Here is my second picture from the mall this morning:

It's a roughly six foot high horse that Arhaus sells to decorate your stable mansion.  There wasn't a price  on it, but some smaller rams of the same style were going for $1200 on sale, so I can only imagine.  I really do like a lot of the furniture at Arhaus, but unless this horse is filled with some Greeks who will jump out and cook me some baklava, I'm not really into this.

So, this weekend we have no less than five Halloween parties, two soccer games, and a baseball game. You know that whole sequence in Goodfellas when Ray Liotta is a nervous wreck because he's being trailed by a helicopter and he's running back and forth cooking sauce at his house and snorting cocaine and trying to get his drug deal done with his Pittsburgh connection?  I have a feeling that this weekend is going to be like that, minus the helicopter, cocaine, and sauce.  Hope your weekend is more restful!