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. 

Rocks and Green Things

That's what this post is:

Another set of slides for my presentation-in-progress, entitled, "Why We Should All Retire To Springdale."
Wait, what?
That's not what this blog is about.
This blog is about the fact that none of us is going to get to retire. Because the world is coming to an end. Right. I nearly forgot. And, so I suppose this is what this post is:
Life is too short to wait.

Other things happened. A ROCK. RAINED. On my head. It was resplendent!

But the life goal that I accomplished over Labor Day weekend was the goal of walking in The Narrows in Zion National Park, a feat I discovered was possible in the fall semester of 2006, when a then-aspiring member of the class of 2011 informed me that he'd done just that. That day, as students' pencils flew toward my head with reckless abandon, I decided that before the world ended, I, too, would take a walk inside these "Narrows" of which my student spoke.

We couldn't go into the Narrows on Saturday due to a flash flood warning. But after walking to all three Emerald Pools and enjoying outsized ice cream cones at the lodge, we were happy to see that the flash flood warning for Sunday was LOW. So, on Sunday, in we went!

Most of the photos of me in the Narrows are not fit for human consumption. In the one you'll see below, that's my, "I'm smiling so hard my face is about to crack" face. I wish I was a better photographer. Next time, my cousin Josh or my friend Krista (who has hiked Angel's Landing, by the way, and I'm not jealous. I'm happy to see the world end while judiciously avoiding Angel's Landing!) will have to fold themselves into the back seat. I'm just glad the disposable camera was in my waterproof pouch when I bit it on the way back out to the Riverside Walk trail. (Out of respect for my perennial travel companion, Miss Gokey, I will let her go through all the shots before I go tagging her on the internet.) Enjoy!