Hallophun & Season's Cider

A crisp, whispily cloudy Halloween night with a full moon and the promise of an extra hour of sleep in the morning? I must've died and jumped state.

Unlike what you're expecting, however, this post starts with the last day of cider pressing and ends with the actual holiday happenings. Wait, last day of cider production for the year? Yes, it's true that all good things must come to an end, and the same rings true with a long ton of apples. I believe in the end our production for this year ended up something short of 150 gallons. And what a year this has been! My favorite on flavor since 2004, this year's cider is a unique sort of sweet, with a little tang, and a perfect balance of a "darker" flavor we haven't hit quite the same in the last couple years (in quotes as that's the best I can describe the flavor). One of the last 5-gallon buckets we filled today also had 7 pears mixed in, and you wouldn't believe the impact one or two of those things can have on the flavor of a single press.

The best part? We had way too many people, so I got to play supervisor and make sure the machine ran smoothly. ;-) Here's some photos from the year, followed by all the Halloween jazz:

A dashing picture of nothing but cans. Mother spent the entire day just making this little fleet, which is far from all we've made.

A different angle.

A different angle.

Nearly the perfect combination. Success of great flavor is largely in variety.

I've seen a lot of weird produce in my lifetime, and this is up there on the list.

One day's end result.

Now, on to the stories of daring candy raids, forking yards, and egging the neighborhood cat. Actually, none of these things occurred on my behalf, but my Halloween was pretty enjoyable, albeit less eventful than usual. After getting home from the day's pressing I washed off my face, shook the apple bits out of my hair, changed, and pinned a few animal hides to my fresh clothing as a costume: I was ready for trick-or-treaters! As I wasn't much in the mood for homework, I sat down to some Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii (graciously borrowed from Daniel) and waited.

Now, our family has been blessed with the little hooligans every year for as long as I can remember. I recall that first year in Sumner when we got a kid in full costume! Even more glorious were the days when we finally moved into a real neighborhood in lower Orting - two whole kids showed up at our door! Despite those years of bounty, they hold no candle to this year's pull up in the Buttes of Orting. We gave out two big bowls of candy, each kid only getting 2-3 pieces. Sarcasm aside, this is the first real year we've been able to give out candy to the childerkins. Dad handled most of the candy giving-out, but I came down when I heard the doorbell go off to see the costumes. Fun fun. I was quite dissapointed that one of the times I didn't come down was when the lone werewolf of the night visited (or as dad put it- "I think he was supposed to be a werewolf.") Jonny brought in a good haul from the street on his first night trick-or-treating, and by extension of his allergies, I brought in a big stack of nutty chocolate. Very good year.

My amazing costume. Adaptations from last year? No more pesky ears, and I wore the coyote pelt on my shoulder instead of the top of my head to avoid last year's problem of the preservatives giving me a headache and dry nose for three days.

It took me three major stores and two days to find this stuff. Wal-mart and Safeway DO NOT sell candy corn, but Target does. Go figure.

I made little gift bags for my friends, which they'll get in the morning.

In totally unrelated news, I nearly got a perfect score on Link's Crossbow Training for Wii. I had literally doubled my previous best scores in a freak of nature super round, only to fall short by about one target. That's a serious downer!

In other unrelated news, I'm now stalking your blog. Yes, even yours.

I'm needing that extra hour of sleep right now...

Dog Soldiers, Artistically Terrifying

So today I broke down and watched a horror flick. And what a flick to choose. As most of you know, I'm not really into horror movies, and I'm not really into gore, but I am a pretty big werewolf fan (which is like saying I love toast but hate jam and butter, in all honesty). Deciding that I really haven't seen enough lycanthropic cinema in my life, I've decided I should do a little catching up (and what better time of year?).

The title? Dog Soldiers. I picked it up from someone's favorite top 10 list. Seems as good a place as any to start.

Anyway, on to my opinion of the movie. In a few words: gritty, witty, disgusting, artistically terrifying, mysterious to the end, and thrilling. The lycans themselves, when you eventually get a full view of 'em, are very sleek, tall, and overall pretty good looking (the above image is a poor example). The basic plot is based around a platoon of six British soldiers doing a routine training mission through the Scottish Highlands. Second day into the mission they see a flair go up, and upon further inspection find a bloody camp full of odd equipment, unused guns, and... no bodies. From there on out it gets really exciting. If you can stomach some pretty intense blood and gore, then I'd highly recommend this movie. If you can't watch the worst of CSI... don't even think about it.

Next up? Curse of The Werewolf. I'm actually ashamed I've never seen this utter classic. The Wolf Man is another. Something cheesy would be a nice wind down from this piece of work, anyway.

In other news, I'm now going to officially announce this blog exists. Hooray! I meant to sooner, I really did...

Shooting Spiders and Other School Life

Still no update released for CellSpin yet, so no easy anywhere posting yet. Sad day.

I'm finally getting off my rumpus and submitting some of my photographs for the 12th edition of Pierce College's SLAM (Student Literary Art Magazine). It's pretty exciting for me, because I haven't really shown my work to the public for several years now, and that's where my better works start coming in. I've toyed around with the idea of selling prints, but haven't found a site yet that doesn't take a huge cut for itself. Perhaps I'll just make my own site and manually handle orders? It'd look good on my resume'...

A sample of one of the works I'll be submitting: "Beach Spider"

(as my skill increases, I find my creativity in naming diminishing.)
I trust my audience is small enough to not need a watermark...

School's been going pretty well. I can particularly say that right now because I've no papers, tests, or homework other than reading all this week, and Friday is off for in-service. I do want to take a moment to brag about a test I took last week in my hardest class this quarter, however (Oceanography). The class average was 69, with nine out of the thirty or so students getting an F, and ten getting an A or B. I got a 91, one of the four A's in class! Comparing myself to two other scores known to me, I either got second or third best out of the class. Not sure why that thrills me so much - what am I, Japanese?

Blogger and Firefox don't really like each other - I get weird reports of half a word being a spelling error... Makes me wonder if Blogger does something special with its text field.

An Blogger is You!

Mmm, blogging. Succulent on the tongue and savory in its aftertaste. Well, actually it tastes more like postage stamps to me, but I'm just trying to be romantic here. I'm hoping to start blogging fairly often so that everyone I'm out of touch with can keep in touch with me. Plus, there's a very nice blogging app that will be supported on my Blackberry by the end of the month which will allow me to update without having to sit down at the computer.

It's been awhile since I've touched any HTML, and the way everything is set up here is rather alien to me. I'm working on the layout now, and that's the more artistically challenging aspect anyway. Once I get that set up I'll publicly announce the fact that I'm starting up blogging in earnest.