Fikapause

It's no secret that Stephen and I are big-time fans of all things Scandinavian. We've been saving up for a while to take a trip to Sweden, the land of (some of) my ancestors. And we're rabid consumers of anything Danish, Finnish, Swedish or Norwegian that can be found stateside: IKEA, Marimekko, H&M, and the little Scandinavian import store we visited in Portland. Stephen even carved me a Dala horse last Christmas.

It's a particularly work-heavy time of the semester right now; I'm spending a lot of weekend hours in the computer lab at school. By mid-afternoon, I'm pretty burnt out, so we've recently adopted fika, the traditional Swedish ritual of sitting down for coffee and pastries with colleagues and friends. Around 4:30, Stephen and I head to the picturesque Danish Pastry House in Medford for mocha and cookies.

Chocolate-dipped macaroons may not be the most nutritious afternoon snack, but it's nice to sit in a warm and cozy cafe when the sun is setting at a depressingly early hour. If anyone knows how to brighten these short winter days, it must be the northern Europeans, right?

Hallowe'en

What would it take for me to really like Halloween?  Kids, I think. I need to have some kids (my own or someone else's) to take trick-or-treating, or a house (or someone else's) where I can give out candy to kids.  It just seems like a great holiday for children.  It was so fun to dress up when I was little and walk around town with a million other kids, collecting candy from people.  Our town had a big Halloween parade on the evening of the 31st, and everyone (families, college students, dogs, whatever) would get dressed up and march down Main Street in the dark to the firehouse, then disburse into the surrounding streets. It was always cold that night, and our parents made us wear winter coats over our costumes even though cats/angels/princesses obviously don't wear puffy jackets.  The best part (besides the candy and the dressing-up) was that my mom let my sister and I wear makeup to go with our costumes.  (This is a big reason that I was a fortune-teller for so many years: they have to wear lots of makeup.) The smell of certain lipsticks still makes me think of Halloween.

I've never enjoyed the holiday as an adult, though.  I like the idea of a Day of the Dead, but the grown-up, American version of the holiday seems to center around (1) violence (blood and gore, dismemberment, brain-gobbling zombies) and (2) skimpy outfits for women (sexy nurse, sexy pirate, etc).  Ugh.  Where is the creativity?  The way I feel about Halloween is the way many people feel about Valentine's Day: it's too commercialized.  I mean, entire stores go up for Halloween.  Even V-day isn't that bad.

So how did I, the Halloween Grinch (or Halloweenie, as a friend dubbed me), celebrate this year? I went back to the holiday's historical roots.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, the Jack-o'-Lantern of legend was a wandering soul who carried a carved turnip lit by an ember.  So we carved dracula turnips and hung them in the window.  Between that and our real live black cat, I think we did the holiday justice.

Maybe next year I'll find a candy-dispensing house to borrow.

Eat Donuts, Sleep, Read

For our Columbus Day trip this year, we drove to New York to visit my parents and siblings. You know those IndieBound bookmarks that say “Eat Sleep Read”?  That pretty much sums up the weekend.  I was still knocked out from a cold I got in September, and I spent 25 hours sleeping it off between Saturday morning and Monday afternoon.  When I wasn’t sleeping, I visited the Village Tea Room with my sister, an Italian restaurant in Gardiner with my parents, got a bunch of take-out with Stephen, and had Sunday brunch at my parents’ favorite bagel place.  I finished up my September book and read through all of my mom’s back issues of Real Simple and O.

On Monday, Stephen and I went apple-picking (and zinnia-picking, and cider donut-eating) with my mom.  It was an overcast day, but the foliage was sparkling and the view was magnificent. 

We got Macouns, Cortlands, a couple of Empires, and one of the last few Macintoshes on the trees.  No Deliciouses, Red or Golden, because I dislike their texture and find them flavorless.  And their name seems like a marketing stunt, like naming Greenland “Greenland”.  I’ll be the judge of deliciousness.

Stephen thought the Goldens were pretty good, though.  Here he is eating one.

Afterward, we went to the farm stand and bought half a dozen cider donuts for the long drive back to Cambridge.  They were warm, fresh out of the donut-maker, so Stephen ate four of them in the first twenty minutes.  I can’t blame him.

When we did this around the same time last fall, I wore shorts and a t-shirt.  Hard to believe that now.  It was way too cold for that this time.  It feels like we transitioned very quickly from late summer to late fall this year, weather-wise.  I like it when October has warm days and chilly nights.  But this past month—in eastern Mass, anyway—it was just plain chilly.  We’ve already had snow twice!     

Maize

I’ve been in corn mazes before. A farm near my parents’ house grows one every year, and I’m always surprised by how disorienting it is. The paths are so narrow that you have to walk single-file, and the plants obscure and muffle everything outside the maze. It’s the perfect setting for a horror movie.

I also got lost (for a couple of minutes) in a real cornfield once, while playing tag with friends. It was late fall, and the plants were withered and brown, the stalks crackling around our feet. As we scattered in all directions, I got turned around and couldn’t figure out how to get out again. Eventually, I stood on my toes and looked toward the horizon. I saw the ridge that borders our town to the west and remembered that I’d come from the opposite direction. I turned and ran to safety.

So I’m no stranger to cornfields. But the maze we visited earlier this fall in Sterling, Mass, was by far the most elaborate, confusing, and complex I’ve ever seen. This eight-acre monstrosity took us over an hour to navigate. Apparently some people stay in all day, finding all the different paths to the exit. It isn’t creepy—the paths are wide and the maze is staffed by helpful people who’ll point you in the right direction if you get frustrated. There’s even a snack bar halfway through. We went with a large group that split up at the entrance; I stuck with Stephen because he is an excellent navigator, and was able to get us out in a flash once I was ready to leave (read: tired and whiny). He must have a compass, an atlas, and a topographic map hardwired into his brain—he almost never gets lost. If we drive somewhere just once (even if I’m driving and I go the wrong way or we turn around a bunch of times or it’s dark or whatever) he remembers the route forever.

I really don’t understand it. I mean, I’ve gotten lost at IKEA.

Which is why I don't go into cornfields alone anymore.

Brimfield

I'm not sure when I first heard about the madness that is the Brimfield antique show, but it's been mentioned to me several times since I moved to Massachusetts. The show is held three times a year, in May, July, and September. Finally, this month, I got a chance to go with Stephen and his parents.

Wow.  So much stuff!  Great old pine cupboards, pie safes, woodworking tools, luggage, boats, lanterns, jewelry, snowshoes, quilts, toys, butter churns, candle molds, fur coats--everything your grandparents and my grandparents and some of the stuff that their grandparents had.  Literal acres of stuff.  I'm glad I didn't have much money to spend, because that helped me filter out a lot of what we passed.  My only regret was not being able to afford a few yards of the vintage French ticking fabric we saw midway through the afternoon.  Like I need more fabric. 

I did get these great old shoes in one of the clothing tents for $5.  The proprietor had been carrying them around to show after show and couldn't find anyone they fit, so she threw them on the sale table.  Yahoo!

Such bargains are dangerous, though. I have trouble passing up any clothing that fits and is on sale, and I've got overburdened dresser drawers and several bulging boxes of shoes to show for it. I'm trying to pare things down a little. I took a bag full of underused stuff to a clothing swap last week and managed to walk away with just two new shirts. I've got a few nice things left that I don't wear much, so I made an appointment to consign them at a local second-hand store next month. The store offer consignors a discount if they spend their earnings there, which sounds like a recipe for disaster (of the not-making-any-money-and-buying-more-stuff variety), but my intention going into this venture is to put more thought and care into buying fewer, nicer things.  We'll see how that goes. 

I do like these shoes, though.

Locavore

We had a breakfast-for-dinner party before school started this month.  The impetus for this celebration was a package of bacon that my sister and brother-in-law got us from a farm near their house.  I've been a semi-vegetarian for eight years (vegetarian from 2001 to 2008, pescetarian for the last year), but I decided that this gift of very special meat--local, cruelty-free, organic, reputedly delicious-- constituted an exceptional circumstance.  There was far too much of it for Stephen and me to eat on our own in a single meal, though, so we invited a few people over and made a local food feast with sliced cantaloupe and roasted onions and red potatoes from our farm share.  The waffles weren't local, but they were heart-shaped and delicious, thanks to Stephen's waffle iron and the apple pie spice our friends brought for the batter.

The drinks weren't local, either, although the limoncello was organic.  This is one my favorite warm-weather drinks: limoncello with cranberry juice, lemonade, and soda water.  Something with coffee might have been more thematically appropriate, but the menu was thrown together with what we had in the kitchen an hour before dinner, so we didn't have time for too many artistic flourishes.  We covered the table with butcher paper and lit beeswax candles in jelly jars for atmosphere.  I love the smell of beeswax.

I'm surprised to see us eating different foods out of our farm share this year.  Last year, we tried (though didn't particularly like) the kohlrabi and fennel, but ignored a lot of the boring staples.  This year, we've given away a lot of our weirder veggies (yes, I do think fennel is weird--that licorice smell!) and feasted on the everyday stuff: carrots and carrots and more carrots, eggplant, kale, garlic, potatoes and onions.  Mark Bittman has helped us out enormously with thinking of new ways to cook the same old stuff.  We've had fried brown rice with bok choy, stuffed kale leaves with fresh mozzarella, baked quinoa with potatoes and whole cloves of garlic.  We're definitely not true locavores, but we're doing what we can here and there.  I'm glad that the modern sustainability movement is becoming more moderate in its demands: eat less meat, eat local more often, buy organic when you can.  It's a lot easier to adhere to guidelines like those than to cut whole swaths of the supermarket out of your life.  I do try to avoid the Cheetos aisle, though.

Nap Time

I spent 24 of the last 48 hours sleeping.  What I thought was some weird new autumn allergy last week turned into a full-blown cold on Saturday evening.  I’d initially hoped to have recovered in time for work today, but ultimately spent the morning (and a good chunk of the afternoon) snoozing. Luckily, I don't have a fever, so I think I can safely assume that it's not the dreaded H1N1.  Iggy seemed to enjoy the company, even though I slept through most of the day.  He sat at the foot of the bed until I woke up at 2pm, then retired to his new favorite hang-out, the box that our digital bathroom scale came in.

I broke my self-imposed quarantine to go see The Informant! last night with Stephen and his parents. (Sorry, fellow Somerville moviegoers—I hope I didn’t infect any of you.) I don’t usually take note of movie soundtracks, but I thought the music added so much comedy to the film. Matt Damon just amazes me. How can the same person play Jason Bourne and Mark Whitacre with equal plausibility? (Acting, I guess.)

On a side note, if I haven’t mentioned this before, I love the word “movie”. It’s so old-fashioned. “Remember when we used to go see those still pictures at the theater? But now they’ve got these new ones that move!” I’d like to bring back the term “talkie,” too.