Fall Update

Another random life update coming your way now. It's another fall edition! Let's see what I've been up to the past month or so. A little hint, a lot of raking leaves...

Okay, so yeah, for starters I've been doing a lot of yard maintenance, cleaning up the falling leaves.

It's a relentless job that seems to never end. We have two very large maple trees out front and another smaller Japanese maple. It's shocking how many leaves a tress has. You don't really realize until they start falling.

For some reason the three trees lose their leaves at different times too. By the time I got the first one all cleaned up, the next tree was just starting to drop them. Its actually and still going now. I filled at least 15 bags so far and I'm only about half way done at this point.

The colors were very pretty for a time before they started falling.

My wife has been doing a lot of baking lately, which is a major plus of course.

It started with a batch of pepparkakor busicuits, which I snapped about previously.

These are a fun cookie in that they give her a chance to use all of her different cookie cutters that she bought in France. The bees are great (especially because of Hive) but my favorite are the pigs. Pepparkakor biscuits are sort of spicy, like gingerbread in a way, so I like to call the biscuits "Spicy pig cookies."

My wife found an old copper bundt cake recently at an antique mall.

Naturally, she gave it a spin right away and baked a few bundt cakes.

The first was an espresso flavored coffee cake.

The second was a lemon bundt which I preferred of the two.

We cut into the lemon bundt before I could take a photo of it. Just picture the cake above with a slightly more yellow hue to it.

Another thing that my wife started baking was bagles - poppy and sesame seed. They turned out really nice, especially for a first attempt.

The last silly thing to say is that I had this, hankering we'll call it, to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and a few other Roald Dahl books. I ended up finding the book at a used book store along with Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. I've now completed the first book and it was actually a pretty good read as an adult. I'm just starting to read Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. I'm two chapters in and can already tell that it's not as good.

I'm still on a strange kick to re-read a lot of the books that I read when I was younger and I'm also finding that I'm reading more these days because of it. It's easier to read a simple book at night and after work when my brain is tired from the day. They don't take a whole lot brain power. I figure that any additional time reading is good though. It's that much less time spent in front of the TV at night.

Well thats it for now.

Until next time, thanks for stopping by.