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.

New Furniture!

Good news! We now have all the basic pieces of furniture! This past week our dining chairs arrived, and we purchased our coffee table from CB2 (thanks Mom!). Below is our dining table, complete with fake Eames chairs.

And here's a picture of our living room with our new coffee table. There's Seth hard at work on the left.

The weekends seem to be flying by. Before I can even catch my breath, it's Monday. On Friday night we attended a Daily Show event, where a producer from the show, a correspondent - Al Madrigal - and a contributor - John Hodgman - all performed stand-up. As Georgia Tech faculty, I got a discount on tickets, so the show was really cheap. And hilarious! Well, Hodgman was hilarious. The producer was fine, and Al Madrigal was kind of a big disappointment. But overall, the show was very entertaining, and one of the first events we've attended since moving to Atlanta. Saturday I cut my hair - just a much needed trim, nothing drastic - and Seth worked on his animation project while I took a 3 hour nap. Did I mention I was tired? Today we ran a few errands and saw Looper, which was great. So good. I would recommend it to anyone. Seriously, go see it now. Tonight the Galaxy play the Rapids, so my night is booked. Then back to work tomorrow!

Another post that talks about the weather

I really didn't want to be that person who has a blog where all they talk about is the weather and food. But I am going to be that person, and I think there's a reason that people do this - because that's the stuff you remember when you sit down to write at the end of the day. Also, my mood and general outlook is surprisingly highly influenced by both my temperature and happiness about what I've eaten.

So, I spoke too soon when I said that I thought Atlanta was cooling down. This weekend was quite toasty - especially Saturday. Sunday was a little cooler because it was really overcast (the forecast for tomorrow is thunderstorms - it's never just rain here, always thunderstorms), which in turn meant it was also more humid. But, the weather channel shows temperatures dropping below 70 next week and then staying there until the end of the month. 70 sounds pretty good to me, so here's hoping that the good folks over at the Weather Channel, which is headquartered here in Atlanta!, are doing their due diligence.

This weekend I made cobbler, and it was soooooooooo delicious. I think most things are delicious, especially when butter sugar flour crumbles are baked on top, but Seth is usually a harder sell on food. But he ate a ton of the cobbler, which is how I know he likes something. If he doesn't like what I've cooked, or what he's cooked, he won't say so, he will just only eat one bite. The cobbler was apple, blackberry, and walnuts. Yum yum yum. It's all gone, so you know I liked it. Next weekend I'm going to try out this recipe for peanut butter and honey cupcakes. Cupcakes are good because I can take the leftovers into work. I'm still new, and I'm not above bribing my co-workers to like me.

Saturday was spent watching the Galaxy game (We have a Roku now, and I paid for the MLS channel. They let us access an archive of most games, so when the Galaxy play at 11:00 pm Eastern time, I don't have to stay up - I can just watch in the morning) and running errands. And making and eating cobbler. Today we went bowling in the morning, then bought frames for our art.

 It looks a little bleak from this angle and in this light, but this bowling alley is so freaking cute. We drove by it a few weekends ago, and I have been wanting to go since then.

 Here's me kicking butt. I bowled like a 125 on the last game. I was pretty excited about it.

 Seth did pretty well too. You may notice that there is no one else in the bowling alley. Needless to say, Sunday mornings in Atlanta aren't a super popular time to go bowling. All the better for us!

Here's one of our prints hung proudly on the wall. Also this is the amazing sparkly pumpkin I bought at Target!

 Here's a peak into our living room, and you can see some more art stuffs on the wall.

You cannot buy liquor at grocery stores in Atlanta

Today we learned that Georgia is one of those states that has strange rules about where and when you can buy alcohol. I was really excited to try and make this caramel apple martini (http://www.abeautifulmess.com/2012/09/caramel-apple-martini.html), but our Kroger only sells wine and beer. Well, all grocery stores only sell beer and wine. So we found a liquor store, but it was a little creepy, and it didn't have the weird flavors of schnapps that the drink required. So now I'm drinking a plain old gin and tonic. Still pretty good.

This past week was pretty fantastic. The weather seems to have finally turned, and instead of highs in the mid-90's, we usually have highs in the low-80's. It is sooo pleasant to be outside these days. Maybe we'll go hiking this weekend!

Here are some photos from Georgia Tech, taken on my way into work. The sky was just too pretty to not photograph. That's super cheesy, but after living in a city known for its smog for nine years, skies like this are noteworthy. I'm not sure what that tower is, but it looks nice in the picture.

The building in this picture (below) is Clough Commons, which is attached to the Library, which is where I work. Look at those clouds!

You can tell this was early morning (like 7:45) because there are no students anywhere. The walkway in the picture above is the Tech walkway (everything at Georgia Tech is named "Tech" + a description of what the thing is, so there's a "Tech Parkway," "Tech Square," and "Tech Park"), and it's usually pretty lively and crowded.

Anyways, things are great over here, and we're looking forward to the weekend!

One Month

Tomorrow morning will mark the one month anniversary since moving to Atlanta. We left LA on August 4th, after packing everything in the moving truck and our cars, and spent five days on the road before arriving at our new home. Seth made a lovely movie about the drive - he filmed whatever was in front of him on the hour, every hour that we were in our cars... And we were in our cars a lot, so there's a lot of great stuff to see.

Unfortunately, the route we took to drive from LA to Atlanta was not a particularly scenic one. When we were driving, in our climate controlled cars,  I would look around at the wide open spaces, and wonder why more people didn't live there. And then we would get out of cars, or I would look at the temperature gauge on my car, and suddenly it would made perfect sense.

Despite the lack of hills, plant/animal life, or civilization, parts of the drive were quite beautiful.

And after braving the torrential downpour that swept across Alabama and Georgia on the 9th (you can see some of the rain in Seth's movie), we pulled up to our building, soooo grateful to have finished the cross country trek. We didn't have our furniture - we slept on an air mattress for two weeks - but we did have this view from our deck!