After spending the last several days editing, I took the evening off :) We went out to dinner for my birthday, and when we got back we scoffed down some baklava. Mmmmm...

For the past few hours I've been playing with a new toy: the Epson Stylus Photo R200 printer. This thing does a great job with photos, and it even prints directly onto special printable CDs or DVDs (which is the main reason I wanted it). It's ultra-cheap, but like most inkjets, the ink costs a small fortune. When you need more ink, it'd cost about the same buying the printer again as it would to replace all six ink cartridges. It's certainly liquid gold for the printer manufacturers!

For our black-and-white high-volume printing, we'll just stick with our HP Laserjet which prints much faster and is still using the same toner cartridge that came with it! This, despite printing thousands of pages since we got it nearly 2 years ago. It is nice having a colour printer to complement it, though :)

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Over the weekend we to Quig's and had a grand old time. We walked through their Haunted Barn which was nicely done, even though all the 'ghosts' were asleep during the day. Just when you think it's over and you're walking through a junkyard area, the path leads you straight back into the barn for more heart-thumping terror. It wasn't as terrifying or elaborate as our visit to the Barn of Terror in 2002, though. Maybe if all the displays had been working and people were jumping out or shouting at us, we would've been more creeped-out by it :)

After our jaunt through the barn, we had a look around some of the shops, and visited the bakery to get some apple cider, doughnuts, fudge, and assorted jams. The smell of brats was in the air, so naturally we had to grab some of those to accompany our doughnut and cider snack.

It wouldn't have been an autumn weekend without more leaf-raking, which is starting to get a little tiresome now. It isn't so bad as shovelling snow or skating around on ice during winter, but it's still a bit of a chore when the yard has an abundance of trees.

This past week we've seen birds perching on the bird-feeder at last. We were beginning to wonder where they were for the last few weeks since we put the thing up. We've also had some squirrels and rabbits scarfing down the snacks we leave for them in a small metal cake-pan on the back porch. Ho-hum, you might say, but it's all rather new and exciting to me. In Australia we'd rarely get a koala up in a tree near the house, or kookaburras on the clothesline, but nothing quite like squirrels and chipmunks frolicking through the yard. I guess possums would be the nearest Australian equivalent, but they tended to only come out at night to feast on our fruit trees.

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Meanwhile we really need to start thinking about what we want to do when we go to New Orleans in November. Anyone got some suggestions for stuff we absolutely, positively shouldn't miss?