Sunday, October 5, 2008

Fall is in the Air

I love fall. There is no better season than fall. Crisp days, orange leaves, apples, squash, beans, hot apple cider, geese, storms, Halloween, the big Thanksgiving dinner with the family. Yep, fall is definitely my favorite time of year.

The last two weeks have been test after test after lab report after speech after test. I don't generally like waiting until the night before a big assignment/test to start preparing, but this time I was continuously staying up after midnight starting to study for a test the next morning. But the good news is, I think I did fairly well on everything. I already received my grade on the Chem II exam; 70/100. The average was a 56 and he said if he were to curve each test, a 56 would be a C-, so it's like getting a B. Not too shabby considering I haven't been successful in chemistry since high school (Mr. Null just explained everything so it made sense!). Talking to classmates it seems like I did about the same as everyone else on my physics midterm; I think I pretty much aced bio ocean, and my speech...well, I didn't black out this time, but I wish I had. It wasn't pretty. I'm not sure why I'm having so much trouble in this class, I did fine in Speech, but for some reason I get out of control nervous whenever I'm giving a speech in this class and everything goes right out the window. Oh well....

Tuesday before class I hiked out to the cliffs across from the marine lab and sat in the sun and worked on homework. The ocean was perfectly flat and there were barely any clouds out. Thursday, after the Bio Ocean exam, I had some extra time so I went for a hike up Trinidad Head. We had a storm moving in, so the waves were fairly big and beautiful. I planned on heading back out there yesterday when the waves were supposed to reach 17 foot swells, but the storm didn't move in as planned and the waves weren't nearly as high as predicted, so I decided to wait.

The storm not coming in though meant yesterday morning was a beautiful day for Pastels on the Plaza and the farmers market. Since it's fall, and fall is my favorite season, we bought five squashes (3 pumpkins, an acorn, and a butternut), lots of honeycrisp apples, some broccoli, local dried beans, local mushrooms, and beets. Afterwards we went to the Big Blue Cafe on the plaza and got pancakes.

This morning I baked the pumpkins, then froze the puree (about 1 1/2 pounds) to use later and roasted the seeds. I'll probably get a couple more pumpkins next week and do the same thing. I might also try to cube some squash for freezing, but the ones I bought this week are already spoken for.

I love fall....

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