Sunshine, Soup, and Stories (bad and good).

For this weekend, a few random things:

• This has been a weekend full of sunshine, so warm that we've hardly needed jackets. What a gift.

• Soon I'll be making this carrot soup. I'll be doing mine with almonds, yogurt, and ginger. It might be yummy to replace some of the carrots with parsnips. And while we're talking about soup (which is pretty much my favorite thing), here's another recipe that is very similar to the tomato soup that I make. It's so delicious and simple that I'll never buy another can of tomato soup again.

• Matt and I spend Wednesday nights with an amazing group of college-aged adults. We call our gathering the Bridge, and we pray together, share about real life, and seek to grow deeper in our relationships with each other and with Jesus. When I have prayer time with the girls and we talk about what's going on in our lives, one of the themes that I've noticed is how our imaginations can run away with us and our thoughts spiral into a mess of worrying, dwelling on old hurts, or judging and criticizing those around us. This has been true in my own head lately. The future is uncertain, relationships are hard. I throw myself pity parties and let the hurts and frustrations take root grow into bitterness and anger as I begin believing lies that God isn't enough, that He has given me the short end of the stick, and that the actions of others determine my level of peace and contentment (or lack of it). I am slowly learning to break old thought patterns and replace the lies with Christ's truth. This blog post calls the negative thoughts "bad stories" that we tell ourselves over and over, and encourages us to interrupt the bad stories with "good stories" that are true and lovely. I've found it to be particularly inspiring in my journey right now.

How Matt and Carrie did Halloween.

The day dawned cold. Winter coat and scarf cold. It was so windy Friday night that we lost power from roughly 8:30pm till about 5:00am Saturday morning. It was a happy moment when I woke up and saw the numbers on my digital clock flashing. I love electricity. A girl's gotta blow dry her hair, after all.

These pictures illustrate one of the things I love best about autumn. No matter how frigid the temperatures, how cloudy the skies, or how much rain falls, the trees around our home make an amazing landscape.

These cute little pumpkins were destined to become our dinner later in the day. It was my first time making my own pumpkin puree. The main benefit it had over the canned stuff was that we got to toast the seeds. The puree became pumpkin tortilla soup. Delicious.

It's not Halloween at the Whites' without some of our favorite guilty-pleasure snacks. Pizza rolls top the list, followed closely by Matt's beloved bacon/water chestnut appetizers.

And Halloween is all about movies. We're not into horror movies in general--I like to sleep at night, and I'm already plenty afraid of the dark as it is. So we've generally stuck with scary "classics", which tend to be a little less insomnia-inducing. Lots of Hitchcock. The Shining a couple of years ago (though that one did keep me up for a night or two ... couldn't get "Redrum! Redrum!" out of my head ...). This year we went with Carrie. I'd never seen it. Loved it, especially once I got past the weirdness of hearing the characters say

"Carrie White" every 30 seconds.

I love the Halloween-creepy expression on THIS guy's face.