randome: the fall 2012 eddition

some random trivia about my life right this moment . . . 

Cloudy with a chance of acorns.
I was quite nervous about facing my first winter one year ago, and here I am, having survived to tell the tale. I even love Maine after experiencing a full round of seasons. AND, last winter was pretty much the mildest winter in Maine's history, so I know that I can't exactly say I really know what winter is yet. Furthermore, people won't stop talking about the acorn production. What? You mean that's not the hottest topic of your dinner party conversations? Yeah, new to me too. But apparently, tons of acorns means the squirrels are preparing for something big. Some see this as a sign that this winter is going to be a doozy. Sofia and I try to run around outside and we're falling all over the place because we can barely find flat ground to walk on, it's a big blanket of acorns. Furthermore, they are starting to fall down from the sky like hail, big huge plops in spurts of 3 to 5 acorns at a time. I'm regularly ducking and covering my daughter's head to protect her from full scale attack. Them squirrels is busy! Could the correlation be true? I'm frightened. 

Riddle me this.
Sofia has started making up riddles. That fact alone cracks me up. Here's her most recent one [we're going to have to work on her grammar, obviously . . . ] 
"What's something that growed? Of course! The trees growed!"
The "of course" is my favorite part. 

A is for apple.
Our most recent iconic New England-y experience is apple picking. We went twice in one week. Honestly, we can't go through too many apples at once, we're not huge fans of applesauce in this house. So really, we make this whole trip and should probably only grab a couple apples, but when they're so beautifully hanging from those trees, it's hard to control yourself. Did you know that my great-great-grandparents had grapefruit orchards? I think I need to get back to my roots and have an orchard of my own. But in the mean time, visiting apple orchards is more about the photo opps, and the toy tractors, and coming away with little wooden coins that certify that Sofia is an official apple picker. I did want to do a little something more with the apples than eat them plain though, so I made my mom's old school apple bread recipe. I do not bake people. And when I brought the bread to my book group, you could tell, they barely touched it. But I brought those left overs to my bible study and they pretty thoroughly gobbled it up and my confidence soared. Nothing like the encouragement of the Body. That's what Church is for, right? The food! 

taste test

workin' hard in the orchard . . . on her gymnastics skills

T is for tractor

How I finally became convinced that I do indeed live in New England

There have been lighthouses, lobsters, a moose, and talk of a non-white winter being unthinkable. But without a real good snowy cold blustering through here, I was starting to become skeptical about the true destination our move brought us too. We headed home for Christmas/New Years, home being both Texas and California, only to disappoint our families due to our lack of grand tales of blizzards and ice. I was comfortable heading out for walks daily, things felt familiar like the sound of the woods back home on my grandfather's ranch growing up, and all these claims that us wimpy California kids couldn't take it sure weren't slowing us down.


But on the morning after our return, as soon as I woke up, Manny drew my attention to the window just above our heads, where a beautiful snow was softly falling and beginning to pile up on the tree just outside our bedroom. In the past few days, several other events have taken place that have convinced me that I may, indeed, be living in New England, despite months of skepticism. I dunno though, each of these observations are actually firsts for me. Help me out Lobsters, does it sound convincing? Do I really live in New England now?


Proof:


1) I witnessed a man [turned out to be a friend even] commuting to and from work via cross-country skis


2) I pulled over off the freeway to attend to a crying baby and noticed ice skaters on a pond through the trees


3) In a short three hour drive, we crossed state lines multiple times [in most of our Texas or California drives, we were able to drive over ten hours without seeing another state]


Just off the highway, we saw a handful of men in the middle of a lake, ice fishing


4) As the sun set, I saw a warm light on a front porch of a house on top of a snowy hill


5) Trees once bursting with color are now bare, emerging forth from snowy embankments


6) The temperature reading for the town we live in read negative 8 this weekend.