kaBLAMO is almost upon us, as i was reminded by my sister jane asking for nanowrimo ideas. since i’ve been doing kablpoye, it didn’t dawn on my that kablpomo is creeping up.
so, do i continue on as i’m doing? do i do a theme month? do i do two posts a day? (please, no, not the last one…)
what are your ideas for this year’s kablpomo? i think for nanowrimo (national novel writing month), i am going to really focus on my devil’s syrup book and see if i can get it done.
in one of my earlier memories of autumn, it is after school, and i am walking by aunt mary’s house in austin. it must be magazine selling time at our school because that’s the only reason i can think of to explain why i am in that neighborhood.
my sneakered feet kick through piles of orange and brown leaves covering the sidewalks, making the leaves fly up against my bare legs.
on a recent run, the fallen leaves were pushed to the sides of the streets that i pound my feet on, and suddenly i felt like kicking through leaves. i veered to the left and kicked up the leaves with my once-again sneakered feet.
*****
the st. john’s campus is beautiful to begin with, but then you add in fall, and it turns transcendent. when you walk from the bus stop to the classroom buildings, the lawn stretching out in front of the quad, the air just crisp enough, the overwhelming presence of trees, it’s like you are home.
there is a tree in front of simons hall that turns brilliant orangey-red. students dwell under it, kick up its fallen leaves, play guitar underneath. it’s known as the god tree.
but wander to the woods and the hue turns to yellow. the trails in the woods meander over hills and along lake sagatagan out to the chapel. all along, you feel like you are floating through a yellow wonderland.
when i dream of universities and colleges, it is some variation of st. john’s, not my alma mater.
i listed my tree photo on etsy. i wrote this for the description:
In Southeastern Minnesota, the fields go on forever, like looking at a sea of waving green. The cornfields hedge you in on your drives on country roads, while the soybeans take a more forgiving approach with their crouching stance in the field dirt.
When fall comes, the corn leaves turn brittle and combines roam the fields in straight lines, sucking up what it needs. The soybeans turn from green, to yellow-green, to brown, the bean pods slowly losing their moisture as the air turns crisp and the nights swallow the daylight. ‘Tis the loaming.
i don’t mind this picture. but it could be better.
my RAW editor settings in pshop:
final edit. could have done more, but this is good.
i took THIS picture with my graduated density filter. it really brought out detail in the sky and clouds while keeping the beans’ details.
so i messed with the basic settings as well as added the graduated filter on my already graduated filter.
cropping does a lot for photos as well!
today was a good produce day. i was going to go to the rochester farmers’ market, but on the way was planning on stopping at ron’s berry farm, which is just outside of eyota. his sign boasted tomatoes, pumpkins, and squash.
it was the only stop i needed to make! i got three big butternut squashes, three pumpkins for my porch, two pie pumpkins, a white pumpkin, and a bag of potatoes for about $20. plus i didn’t need to deal with the hordes at the market and was able to buy directly from the farmer.
then off to lacrosse with charlie (yay!), where we went to an apple orchard. $12.50 for a bag of honeycrisp?! no thanks. then doug and charlie found the “seconds” apples, which weren’t perfectly round or had a little spot on them, of which honeycrisp were $6. i’ll take that!
and sometime this week i have to head over to mom and dad’s neighbors and get some apples off their tree. i’ll be making more applesauce and pies in my future.
(also squash potato soup, which is delicious.)
summer is not the greatest time to be making cookies. the oven heats up, it’s making a lot of unnecessary heat in the house, etc. etc.
so now that it’s cooled down outside, i thought i’d take another crack at pursuing getting my way through america’s test kitchen cookie section. i opened up the book to see what i could try to tackle and took a little browse through the cookies, then decided to just make some chocolate chip cookies.
sorry for you! ATK will resume another day. that’s the way the cookie crumbles…
i got the final backsplash tiles in the mail today, so i finished that bad boy up!
now i just need to paint the other wall the blue color and i’ll be good.
75% of my photos are post-processing. case in point:
perfectly fine photo. i shoot aperture priority in my camera in RAW so as much color information is maintained as possible. i figure my cam’s a sophisticated piece of equipment; let it do most of the work.
then i pull it into p-shop’s RAW editor, which *swoon*
up the saturation, contrast, lower the highlights, bring out the red in the tree on the right, and voila.