moon, skeleton trees
creepy crawlies, ghosts, and such
tis the witching hour
*****
glowing orange pumpkins
scowls, evil carvings from flesh
ward off lurking ghouls
*****
october again
cooler, crisper, sharper air
summer season closed
****
for all hallow’s eve
opening doors to strangers
trusting holiday
went biking on the root river trail! we started off in fountain and made our way down to lanesboro. when all was said and done, 11.2 miles of biking today!
i have really been slacking on the blog posts! ugh. november is looming and this doesn’t bode well for my daily kitty pics.
we’ll see what happens!
tomorrow is biking day. i’ll try to get some pics and make tomorrow’s post interesting.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
everyone raves about this book by cormac mccarthy on reddit, so i decided to pick it up. i was really really thinking it was going to be something absolutely horrible to try to get into with a beyond pretentious sentence structure and winding, annoying paragraphs that never end.
boy, was i wrong.
at first i was a little scared, because while the sentences are simple and paragraphs short, mccarthy has a distinct way of writing that i was afraid was going to be pretentiousness defined. but i got so sucked in, it doesn’t matter if it is pretentious.
it’s a post-apocalyptic story about a father and his son walking their way to the east coast and the trials they run into along the way.
there are no quotation marks. there are deliberately missing apostrophes. the sentences are brief and fragmented at times. grammatically, mccarthy has written a nightmare.
in terms of plot and style? top notch. i recommend this 100%.
but i have a rant – not about this particular book, but about post-apocalyptic/dustopian world books in general.
i realize that stories need conflict, but it seems that these books always end in a horrible way. people don’t know what they’re doing; most of them have turned evil and are keeping others as slaves and/or food; all bicycles have somehow disappeared; and there is no food anywhere for anyone.
people lived without electricity and modern-day conveniences for a lot longer than with, and they managed to live in relative harmony (at least relative enough to get us where we are today). people are doing this TODAY.
somehow i’m to believe that people can’t figure out how to grow their own food, raise their own animals, dig their own wells – basically go little house on the prairie – once electricity has left the building? i’m not sure i buy it.
people are resourceful, strong-willed, and a lot more willing to learn than i think others realize. there will be some bad apples, but i think the bad apples will be put down a lot sooner than the bad apples would bring fire and brimstone down upon the average nice people of the earth.
there are many people living off the grid as it is; i don’t think it’s impossible to believe people would figure out how to survive without resorting to these awful strategies you read in books.
it was the baking powder. made up a double batch of the pumpkin bread tonight using new baking powder, and tada! the breads rose normally.
i put chocolate chips in one! i’m taking it to work tomorrow, so we’ll see how it is then.
normally i am not one for seeing movie adaptations of books that i thoroughly enjoy. but when i saw the trailer for gone girl, i knew i’d go see this one.
ahem: *spoilers!*
surprisingly, the movie sticks relatively close to the book’s plot (relatively because i’ve seen books veer so off course, it’s a new plot). there are a few embellishments, like the scene where amy kills desi. in the book, she drugs his wine and then stabs him. in the movie, she swipes his neck with a boxcutter midcoitus. and it is VERY bloody (and we see neil patrick harris’ junk covered in blood).
the end is also toyed with a little, but the things that need to get done get done.
the movie is classic david fincher: dark, shadowy, moody. when one of my movie mates afterward said it was like no one acted in the movie, i thought, huh. i thought they acted out the characters exactly. but then, the characters in the book are doing nothing but acting the whole time, aren’t they? we never really know who amy is, and nick is trying to cover up so much stuff that he has to have the ultimate poker face.
the movie, while entertaining, is not as engrossing as the book (as is always the case). i recently reread the book and once again could barely put it down. it helps to know the psychopathic nuances going into the movie, because afterward, the people i saw the movie with weren’t entirely impressed with it. meanwhile, i was thinking, hey, that was a pretty darn good adaptation.
what did i not like? NPH would not have been the person i’d’ve chosen for desi. at the end of the book, nick realizes that he doesn’t hate all women; he hates amy. in the movie, i got the impression otherwise. we did not get the sense of complete helplessness from nick when amy gets pregnant – it’s more like he’s just manning up to his responsibility rather than in the book where he was overwhelmed by the thought of his kid. also, there is a moment at the end where nick slams amy’s head against the wall, which is NOT something i would have done. i know nick hates amy, but come on. we want to keep that better image of nick.
was it as good as the book? no. was it a well-done movie? i think so, but then i’m biased because i was so enamored by the book.
i requested an ice cream maker for christmas.
after another attempt at trying to find decent ice cream at mike’s, i have given up hope in the major ice cream brands. mike’s doesn’t carry breyers, and they only have two flavors of ben and jerry’s. i thought i would buy cadbury ice cream bars since they’d been really good and devil’s syrup free when the first came out, but i saw they were now owned by blue bunny, and SURPRISE devil’s syrup.
thanks, blue bunny.
i ended up buying the sugar free ice cream, which has about 1400 ingredients.
so, here’s hoping an ice cream maker makes its way under the tree for me this year. homemade ice cream is delicious, and i would be able to make frozen fruit ice, etc. at the same time.
i’ve been meaning to get up early enough to take photos at sunrise for a long time. looong time. we’re talking years long time.
on saturday, i finally did it. i had scouted out where i wanted to take pictures earlier in the month; i knew i wanted to do it along hwy 16 down here in southeastern MN, which is a scenic byway.
i pulled out and drove east on hwy 14 at about 6:35, and the horizon was just starting to get a little dusty. i drove a winding way down to whalan, which is near lanesboro. the topography is interesting: you have pretty tree-less prairie land with occasional hills, which are loaded with commodity crops; then suddenly, you drop into a river valley where the land is nothing but hills covered with trees.
at one point on my drive, i was on a hill on the prairie, and i could see south for miles. fog had rolled in overnight due to the below-freezing temps, and it looked spooky with the hills poking out of the grey-ish white fog in the barely there pre-dawn dark.
(at this point, i was thanking my lucky stars, because i had always wanted to get up in the morning and take some fog pics too.)
i drove to whalan and found my barn, but sunrise was another 15 minutes away, and it would take longer than that for it to crest the hill enough to be visible. i drove out of the valley, just up a gravel road, and parked my car next to a field where i waited for the sun to make its appearance.
sunrise light is beautiful. it makes everything look new and crisp, and with the frost still on the ground, the crops and grass looked mystical.
after i got some photos on the prairie, i went back down into the valley and got my barn pictures. all in all, they weren’t my favorite photos taken that day, and the barn was the reason i drove out.
i drove into lanesboro afterward to try my hand at waterfall pictures (epic fail, and i almost biffed it on some ice), and took about a mile walk on the bike trail, getting flat on the ground at one point.
as a bonus, i was able to take in the lanesboro farmers’ market, which i’d been meaning to check out all summer. small, and i wouldn’t make a special trip, but it was worth checking out. i bought another pie pumpkin and some garlic to plant.
i left lanesboro and the valley around 9:30 and got home around 10. it was only mid-morning and i felt like i’d been up for half a day already. but it was totally worth it.
now that i know what to expect, i’ll do sunrise pictures again.
i think my baking powder is shot. this is the second recipe i’ve made out of ATK that should’ve risen at least a tiny bit more than it did (the first was white cake). bread like this should not be insanely flat.
anyway.
i roasted and pureed some pie pumpkins last weekend, and i was itching to make something pumpkiny out of them. why not see what america’s test kitchen had for pumpkin bread?
turns out, it has something DELICIOUS.
the weird thing about this recipe? you cook the pumpkin with the spices over the stove before you mix it into the recipe. i think this is twofold reasoning: canned pumpkin might be a little more watery than fresh, and it infuses the spices into the pumpkin while bringing out pumpkin flavors.
no overload on spices; the recipe just called for minimal amounts of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. a couple weird additions: cream cheese and buttermilk.
now, i may have screwed up this recipe and been my own undoing. i “made” buttermilk with whole milk and vinegar (totally acceptable!!) AND i substituted cottage cheese for the cream cheese (the internet told me to do it). (i didn’t want to go to the store again.)
add a nice, crumbly topping, and into the oven it goes. i baked this for more than the allotted time, and it was still a little gooey in the center. was this due to my weird substitutions? am i just horrible at baking breads like these? is the skewer a liar? THE WORLD MAY NEVER KNOW.
see? a little weirdly flat-ish. and sunken in the center. i think i have to get new baking powder and see if that fixes it.
but DANG if this isn’t some of the best pumpkin bread i’ve eaten. you can really tell it’s PUMPKIN, not just a conduit for pumpkinesque spices.
point: ATK