On celebrating Halloween...

I have decided that how you spend Halloween is determined by your age.
As a young child you enjoy coming up with costumes and dragging your parents (read: costumed Dad) around the neighborhood with you. You return home, dump your candy on the living room floor and start trading with your younger siblings. You always end up with the choicest candy (and the most....having slyly placed your pile in close enough proximity to allow stray candy from your siblings pile to defect to yours). This strategy is essential because your candy becomes quarantined on top of the fridge where your parents "tax it."

As a teenager you still dress up for Halloween in some capacity, maybe for a halloween dance, or for class. But you do not go trick or treating and those who do are censured by adults and chastised by their girlfriends who are at home doing homework instead of traipsing about the neighborhood dressed as the guy from the Crow.

As a college student you use halloween as an excuse to have adult candy (read: drugs, sex, alcohol) and wear the most temperature inappropriate costume as you can without freezing to death.

I think I officially qualify as an adult now. I am currently handing out candy (and watching the gamecast of the world series...so I'm handing out candy and world series scores) to the toddler group who make their rounds at dusk, their parents imploring me to bring my kids by their homes later and cheering on the Giants, thanking me for the update.

Fall, tucking in.

Having been gone for the better part of two months, I was quite afraid that I would miss out on the garden and the glories of summer in the Willamette Valley. I did miss the peak weather, but I still was able to enjoy the harvest.

Before school started, I tried to pack my summer break into the remaining few weeks...and by break I mean, enjoying the garden, doing things around the house, putting my visiting (and gracious) family to work, and drinking in the glories of Pacific Northwest food/drink/weather.

My Dad did some finishing work on the deck and this past weekend Joe and I went over the entire thing lightly with the belt sander and I applied some Tung oil to help minimize the weather damage to the cedar. We also finally constructed and installed the lattice so the tiny clematis that I've been trying to keep alive has something to hang on to.

The raspberries are still producing enough to enjoy a light snack while prowling the garden.

And, it seems that tomatoes were rather late this year, so only in the past few weeks has the weather coaxed some color out of the Brandywines... 

Joe somehow convinced our next door neighbor to take him mushroom hunting (and no, we won't tell you where) and he returned home one evening with almost 7 pounds of chanterelles. 

We took a three-day weekend to both celebrate a wedding in Seattle and to prep the garden for winter. We had some wood chips delivered (free!) and we're trying out a new garden path method (pictures forthcoming). The backyard beds are still trying to produce tomatoes and cabbages, but the others have been allocated to garlic (Silver Rose varietal) and onions (red, white and yellow). Joe also secured some winter barley seeds from a connection at the brewery so we're going to see how that goes. We're trying everything both at home and at the Oakshire Urban Farm too, so we get two bites at the apple, as it were.

The fall has been bright, crisp and dry thus far, but the forecast tells of rain for the weekend, so it's reading and homework.

 

 Otherwise, these days you'll find me sitting at my desk in my office at school trying to make something of myself in the crazy academic world.

A snoring neck warmer

As I type away at the computer...