Crafts and Knee Injuries

Maybe it's the changing weather, maybe it's my realization that I watch way too much T.V. while looking at Buzzfeed articles, or maybe I've become really inspired, but this weekend I felt like doing some crafts. I'd seen a tutorial on how to make an acorn garland, and I thought it was so cute, and definitely something I could do. The full tutorial can be found here: http://www.abeautifulmess.com/2010/10/tricks-treats-rachels-acorn-garland.html. 

While we were at Michael's buying the supplies for the garland, I decided I also wanted to make a felt fall wreath. This was something I wanted to do last year but never got around to, so I went crazy at Michael's and bought a ton of craft supplies and had a grand time yesterday afternoon just making stuff. 

You can see the acorn garland hanging above the door. You can also see Seth's painted pumpkin in the left bottom corner.

This is the felt wreath. I didn't space out the different colors well enough, so one section has too many pieces and is much larger than the others. I was a little bummed, but then Seth suggested that I put a bow over the spot. Brilliant! I'm really excited about how well both things went, and I will probably be looking for some other crafts to do in the coming weeks. 

After a lackadaisical morning watching Heathers, which I had never seen before - very good! - Seth and I headed to the park to play a little soccer. I only made it like 15 minutes before I totally destroyed my knee trying to kick the ball while it was in the air. It was such a simple thing to do, but I guess given my previous knee problems and how long it's been since I played (we've played one other time earlier this month, but other than that, it's been years), I was just unprepared to twist my knee that way. I can walk and I'm not in a ton of pain. Mostly I'm bummed that so little was able to take me down so quickly. I feel old and feeble, and I don't like it one bit. Now I'm resting on the couch with an ice pack, about to read The Marriage Plot, which so far I would highly recommend.

And finally, in totally unrelated news, I was a guest on Lost in the Stacks, a radio show about libraries  here at Georgia Tech, talking about Big Data and my job as a Research Data Librarian. You can hear it here for the next two weeks, or I have personal copies if anyone misses the two-week window and really wants to hear me talk about data. 

Painting A Pumpkin

This is, step by step, how I made my Halloween pumpkin this year.

Pumpkins!

This Saturday, Seth and I drove out to Burt's Pumpkin Farm, out in Dawsonville. I don't really know much about Dawsonville. It's about two hours North of Atlanta, and seems to be pretty spread out. Oh, their Town Hall is in the center of a round about! I wish I had taken a picture of it, but it all happened so fast.

On the way to the farm we stopped at a Library Book Sale, in a town whose name I don't remember, and we got 7 books for $6.00. I love Library Book Sales! Anyways, we passed a number of other pumpkin farms and corn mazes on the way, and just when I was starting to think that we should have just stopped at one of those, we saw the sign warning, "Pumpkin Pickers Ahead." I had (wrongly) assumed that Burt's would be sort of a low key pumpkin patch, and boy was I wrong. The place was packed. There had to be close to 300-400 people on the farm, from seemingly all over the area. Thankfully, Burts's had tons of pumpkins, and many different kinds of pumpkins, most of which I had never seen.
Below are some of photos of our adventures.

 You may notice that this man is wearing an orange shirt that matches the pumpkins. A lot of people were wearing pumpkin/Halloween themed attire.

The farm had tons of pumpkins I had never seen before. Some were white, some were blue, some were really lumpy, some had crazy long stems, and some were really flat.

 And some were huge! I really wanted to hug one. My wish came true, but I didn't capture it on film.

 I eventually chose a pumpkin from the regular pumpkin section.

 Posing with the huge pumpkins. It was really sunny out.

Here's Seth at the entrance to the Farm. It was beautiful out there. And while it was sunny, it was still cool with a breeze. Oh man, fall has been great so far.

Here's our pumpkin haul. Seth is going to paint his blue/green pumpkin with chevron stripes. He is documenting the process, and I'll make sure to post that. I'm going to carve my orange pumpkin once it gets closer to the 31st.