This week was sort of a blur, as my time off finally caught up with me. I feel like I’ve been playing catch up all week, and still can’t quite wrangle all the ducks back into their rows.

Corinne posted at the beginning of the week that the next mailing date for our dark round robin was just five days away, on Friday. My response when I read it was OH, F%CK, loud enough that it made the dog bark—no small achievement, since he’s pretty much deaf. I hadn’t really started on the book yet.

The good news is that the theme of Laura’s book is real haunted houses—and I have well over 200 photos from my September outing at the Woodmen’s Circle Home, my favorite “might be haunted” house. I knew when she posted her theme to our group that I’d be using this house as my topic, and it was just dumb luck that the house was opened to the public for a few hours just at the perfect time. So, I set to work. First, I did this layout, using three photos I shot of the exterior in 2004, to create one big panorama—and then, with a little PhotoShop voodoo, made it more dramatic, and gave it a more impressive sky:

OK, great. Now what? I had all these photos, but no real ideas on how to use them. Plus, I had to find a way to link it to the whole haunted house thing. Sure, it looks haunted, but there are local stories about it, too.

I ended up doing a sort of file folder thing, using extension of the big photo as the flap that folds over all the other work I did in the book. Here it is closed:

To look inside, check the dark round robin gallery in the altered books section of the site. I ended up doing three more sets of interior pages, with quotes about the house from people who have visited it scrawled on cards and pieces of paper mixed in with my photos. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out—and, it went out on time on Friday, which means I can take a breath on this project for a couple of days.

The one thing I haven’t managed to do much of this week is work in my garden. Fall has sort of arrived here, with temps dipping into the 80s, and occasionally the 70s, during the day. This lovely weather is ideal for fall planting and clean up, both of which I desperately need to do before the whole garden gets away from me and goes crazy. My neighbors to the west are really bad about keeping our fence line cleaned up, so there are nasty weedy vines growing all over it right now, making me crazy. I’m also way behind on planting cool season veggies, and I have a whole new section of herb garden that is built and filled with good soil, but empty.

Must. Find. Time. To. Garden.