I love Fall. Specifically, I love October. I love when pumpkins start piling up outside of grocery stores and when pumpkin pie ice cream shows up (on sale!) inside of those grocery stores. I love when my neighborhood Peet's Coffee and Starbucks, located literally right across the street from each other, put out competing signs for pumpkin spice lattes. I love when Trader Joe's sends out its October newsletter ever so appropriately titled "All Things Pumpkin; Pumpkin in All Things; Other Stuff, Too" so I can read it in bed while watching "Orange is the New Black" and drool over things I don't need but have to have, like pumpkin cream cheese and pumpkin butter.
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| Aaaand, it's VooDoo Donuts themed this year. How Portland. |
Go and Do: The Haunted MAiZE (at The Pumpkin Patch on Sauvie Island): Okay, so it's not so much a haunted maze as it is a haunted walk or guided path, but neither of those descriptions allow for clever word play. Either way, you will be chased in cornfields by strangers with chainsaws. Who wouldn't want that?
Watch: Halloween. The 1978 version. Michael Myers (no, not from Austin Powers) vs. a twenty-something Jamie Lee Curtis. With bad acting, a catchy theme song, and a masked man who just will not die no matter how many times you stab him with a knitting needle, clothes hanger, or even his own knife, Halloween is so much more than just another teen slasher flick.
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| This happens. See for yourself. |
Read: Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Because where else are you going to get a description like this of an excessively overweight woman?
"The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon."
Listen: As if Bon Iver's "Skinny Love" wasn't enough, a seventeen-year-old Brit named Birdy released an acoustic version of the song, a feat I never would have thought possible. Our work Pandora station has picked this up as a favorite -- God knows why -- and every time, I'm like...Eat and Drink: A list is required.
- Spiced Apple Cider (and, while you're at it, apple cider donut muffins!!)
- Pumpkin Pancakes from scratch, courtesy of Joy the Baker.
- Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies
- These adorable pie crust leaves as seen on Cupcakes and Cashmere.
- And, of course, Blue Moon Harvest Pumpkin Ale. Which, I might add, goes quite nicely with homemade cinnamon sugar popcorn.
Happy October!
