Halloween and other fall activities

It has been a nice, warm fall so far. We had a great garden, and I was sad when I ripped it all out yesterday. It was supposed to get cold and snow on us today, but it just got slightly colder and snowed in the mountains. We did get a bit of rain.

 These were the monster tomatoes on our vines. We had more that didn't ripen in time.

 Here's photo of the garden and the tomato plants.

 This tomato was 1/2 ounce short of 2 lbs.

 This tomato was almost the same size. They are "heirloom" tomatoes, which translates into sort-of-funny-looking-but-OK-tasting tomatoes.

 Our three pumpkins were smaller than the tomatoes.

 A few weeks ago we went on a picnic up the canyon.

 We enjoyed the fall colors, even though you can't really see them in the photo.

 We actually cooked hot dogs over a grill. Amazing. Usually we just eat sandwiches or something like that.

 Lucy looks like she is riding through Monument Valley (if you ignore the plugs on the wall), but she is just at the Natural History Museum.

 We got a better shot of Henry riding past the Mittens.

 Lucy is here at BYU with some of the cast of the opera this fall. We went to a one-hour family concert that had some opera highlights from The Marriage of Figaro. The kids were OK with it, but mostly just miffed that we weren't seeing the whole opera. A week or two earlier I had bought a DVD of The Magic Flute and they all sat and watched it (in German with English subtitles).

 Edward was leading out on his section of the Halloween parade at the school.

 I caught Lucy a bit later as she was walking through the hallways.

The kids had fun with Halloween. We had a blue 2x3 Lego (Edward), a black hole (Andrew), a fancy princess (Lucy), and a shiny dragon (Henry). Two costumes were mostly from previous years, so I really only had to make the Lego and the black hole. Andrew wore a big cape covered in stars and galaxies and then had a circle colored black underneath, "the black hole." We decided that the education level of the people directly correlated with how hard they laughed when he explained his costume. Kirk missed most of the festivities since he is on a research trip to Europe right now.