Jeremie and I waited in line at our polling place for an hour and twenty minutes this morning and everything in me says the time was absolutely worth it. I think voting is extremely important. Every time I hear people talk about how their vote doesn’t matter I die a little inside.

The reason the lines were so long in Stamford was that they put 10 questions on the ballot (city stuff) and most people had not seen the questions before they stepped in the polls. Consequently, people took much longer to vote than they usually do because they had to read those darned questions. Ah well.

If you haven’t gone to vote yet, grab a cup of coffee and go get in line. You’ll get a sticker.

I’m back from a brief jaunt to Paris with my Mom and a wonderful time was had by all. The weather was great so we walked almost everywhere and saw lots of things we hadn’t seen before. We took a day trip to Giverny to see Claude Monet’s home and his famous gardens, visited a very interesting museum that I had read about in the New York Times a few months back (Musee Nissim de Camondo) and hit up a smattering of kitchen shops, patisseries and tea shops. I have a nice selection of macarons from Laduree to keep me company but I’m eating my way through them quite quickly. Ah, well. I’ll just have to go back.

It never feels like fall until I go apple picking. Yesterday afternoon Jeremie and I headed out with Sarah, Chris and Justin to an orchard in NY state not too far from the Newburgh-Beacon bridge. The drive was amazing. This has got to be prime leaf-peeper time. The orchard had a funny system. You drive your own car into the orchard and you fill up bags with apples. You pay by the bag instead of the pound. We were pretty sure we were getting the short end of the stick but when I got home I jumped on the scale with the apples and found that we had 21.5 lbs of apples. Divided out, the price came to around 50 cents/lb which is pretty darn cheep.
We had cider donuts. Cider donuts taste good. Kettle corn tastes good too. My stomach is not very fond of kettle corn and cider donuts together.

picking pictures: in the gallery.

If you find it, let me know.

The past week has been too f-ked up for words.

my left index finger has a message for you: Wusthof Santoku knives are sharp!

*&% f^#@ing da&%it. Ow, ow, ow. Typing difficult. I quit.

I have a very bad habit of finding out about really cool things, like concerts, just a little too late.

Case in point: “Oh! Wouldn’t it be really cool to go see Mike Doughty play at Fez on October 16? Yes! It would indeed be really cool.” So, I call and they’re sold out. This is the state of my luck and pretty much why I haven’t been to a concert in like a year. Seriously. This has got to end.

Whenever I wear a white shirt to work I manage to spill coffee all over my front. I should get a prize.

My company gave each employee a cardboard tube containing 10 legos. I’ll leave it at that.

This morning there was a thick layer of frost on my car. Sad.

I can’t believe it’s October! It’s starting to be consistently chilly and it finally feels like fall. Yesterday at the grocery store they had a big display of pumpkins and I would’ve bought one but it had just rained and they were very wet. And since they were piled on top of hay they smelled very, very bad because wet hay smells very, very bad. I need to get involved in some fallish activities like apple picking. I loves apples.

It’s late, late, late in the day & I’m stuck here at work because Jeremie and I carpooled and he is in crisis mode down on the first floor. As I am a nice person I am not going to leave him stranded here. Instead I will take some time and update this with what the heck I’ve been doing the past two weeks. I’ve been a busy bee.

A couple of Thursdays ago, the day after my previous post, Jeremie and I treated ourselves to a lovely dinner at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Pocantico Hills, NY. I say treat because it was a little more than we usually spend for dinner and I had to make reservations a month in advance (thanks, OpenTable). The food was fantastic. Even the butter was out of this world. I recommend highly.

Last week Monday I flew out to Madison, WI with a couple of my work friends/colleagues to head up our recruiting efforts there. A very nice time was had by all. It’s a great school and we talked to a lot of good people at the career fair. Amy gave us a walking tour of the campus and so many things are eerily similar to UMich. Madison’s main drag is State Street and it has 2 Espresso Royale Caffes on opposite ends of the street, just like in Ann Arbor. Crazy!

We flew back to CT Wednesday morning, utterly exhausted. I did a couple loads of laundry that night and then Jeremie and I packed up the car and headed out to Detroit on Thursday afternoon. The drive was beautiful but served as an excellent reminder as to why I love flying. We didn’t get to his parent’s house until a bit after 1a Friday morning. The last hour and a half were definitely a struggle. Same thing on the way home. We left around noon on Sunday, planning to be home around 11p but Pennsylvania had other plans for us. We got stuck in construction traffic right near the end of I-80 in PA and that debacle cost us about an hour and 40 minutes of our life. Arrival at home: 1am.

It was all worth it. We had a lovely time in Detroit and it was the first time in as long as I remember that all of Jeremie’s siblings and I (and his parents) have been in the same place. We spent a good amount of time with his Grandma who is One Cool Lady. We shul’ed it up for Yom Kippur, fasted the whole day and had a great break-fast in the makeshift sukkah/florida room. Jeremie’s mom made this fantastic boterkoek with ginger in it that I’m still dreaming about. So tasty! Mmmn, butter. After most everyone had left from the break-fast, Jeremie, Elias, Adena, and I sat around the table and listened to Grandma tell stories while we enjoyed delectable fresh figs, hand-picked apples and pomegranates. She told us some fantastic stories of her times as a young woman working in downtown Detroit, back when Detroit was a fancy place to be. She was a feisty one!

The crazy travel is over for a couple of weeks, then it will pick back up again. For now, I’m going to try to get as much sleep as I can. So far, it’s been an unsuccessful week in that department.