Campfire - Warren Dunes, October 12

Photo of our partially-2x4 fire, which was unbelievably awesome once we got it going.

to be uploaded here, for the wood-and-feathers challenge.

Official Entry

You will recognize some of the images below which I have previously uploaded onto past posts. Put together, they form my September contribution to the Artastic Challenge Blog here on blogger. The criteria were that the entries be happy, colorful, whimsical, and/or fun.

Much better than SAT practice questions. :)

What fun and happy experiences are you having this fall?

Autumn in the Midwest art challenge preview

I'm only calling this "art challenge preview" because as I downloaded the photos for it, I realized I want to use them in the September Artastic "whimsy" challenge. We'll see what happens. In the meantime...

One of the great causes for celebration in my life at the moment is the fact that it is fall. This past week, the "Adam @ Home" comic strip, run in the Northwest Indiana Times, has featured an Adam obsessed with all things pumpkin. I kind of feel like Adam.

Don't get me wrong. The desert has seasons. One of the things that used to bother me about non-desert-dwellers was their denial of the fact of seasons in the desert. In the fall in the desert, temperatures during the day and evening fall to the dry, comfortable 90s, and the nights cool off. They don't cool off enough to cause hoodies or hot chocolate at football games, but there IS a distinct change. It's not like fall in the Midwest, though. Not at all. Many was the year that I toyed with the idea of flying back home just for some fall foliage, and my friend Caryn once mailed me some leaves from Buffalo, NY, because she knew how much I liked them. Last fall, on Halloween weekend, I had the opportunity to fly home for Jodi's wedding shower, and I'm pretty sure that that trip had A LOT to do with my decision to ultimately move back to the east side of the Mississippi River for the foreseeable future.

I know all you (two) readers out there in the desert are missing me, but I see daily in your facebook updates that life is going on just fine. Please see below still more justification for my transcontinental relocation.

I'm anticipating having gainful and meaningful, if only part time, employment any day now. One of those opportunities required a pre-employment drug test. After the drug test, I decided to hunt for some geocaches on the nearby bike path, and this is what I found. This photo, at least, is legit. It's very near Hammond, where I live. The remainder of the photos are from southern Michigan, where there are, like, farms and stuff. So the rest of them don't really reflect where I live, just like my photos of Zion NP back in the day didn't reflect WHERE I lived, but I believe they capture the spirit of the season here in the Midwest pretty well. 

Yesterday was my dad's birthday, so we went apple picking with Uncle Michael and Aunt Ruth.

The apple trees

The barn at Shafer Orchards. 

I call this guy "jack-o-head," and I'm pretty sure that you'll definitely see him on my challenge blog entry. 

squashes

The resident farm dog, Ivy.

Perhaps a future blog post can celebrate autumn HERE in Hammond and the surrounding towns. In the meantime, this begins a season of apple-and-green-tomato-based diet for me. Please feel free to send me links to your own blogs, where you have posted photos of what fall is like where you are. 

Bon appetit. 

You Would Think...

...that I would finally get back to giving you all advice about how to prepare for the disasters of the future, or how to celebrate the survival of the present.

But no; instead, I'm going to upload a series of four watercolor paintings that my friends and I worked on in Wisconsin earlier this month, because time is running out for us to get them uploaded to the ARTastic watercolour challenge.

After reading Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty, about which I could rant for days, but you can just look at my review on goodreads.com, and reading one of the world's most terrible romance novels, I started to re-read The Happiness Project. Gretchen Rubin says at the beginning of Chapter 3 that her research revealed, "that challenge and novelty are key elements to happiness."

I have an additional comment: watercolor painting is also a key element to happiness. I think it falls under the category of "play."

That said, follow the general link to "http://impendingapocalypses.blogspot.com/" or simply google "The Memoir of Narrow Escape" to see the images.