Picture of the Day: October 14th to October 20th

October 14th: We spent tonight cooking down the pumpkins (including the giant one) from our garden. Mark was smart and bagged them up premeasured for making pie, so all we'll have to do is take one bag out of the freezer without having to guess if it's enough pumpkin. Mmm...pie...

October 15th: Finally, the butterflies are realizing that we have flowers in our yard! Since my butterfly bush died earlier this year when our yard flooded, the flowers are all I have left to attract them.

October 16th: Mark and I went out to dinner with our buddy Jeff, then went back to his apartment to play some poker. His kitty, Rorschach, wanted to play, too, I guess. We had dinner at Ray's The Steaks...they both had steaks, and I had a ginormous delicious burger and some crab bisque. It was a nice distraction from all of the government shutdown stuff; Mark and I have been basically working for free for the past couple weeks and I've been glued to the TV and the news websites, so it was probably good that I was forced to get away from that stuff for a few hours. 

October 17th: I meant to get up in time to go flying this morning, but since I accidentally set my alarm clock for 8:30pm instead of 8:30am, that didn't exactly happen. It was still a good trip to the airport, though...there was a B-25 sitting on the ramp!! It was in town for a flyby at Arlington National Cemetery the next morning.

October 18th: Today I set my alarm correctly, got up early, and made it out to the airport in time to see the B-25 fire up for the flyby. Very cool! After it took off, my buddy Dave and I took his plane out to shoot a couple instrument approaches. Fun fun!

October 19th: I've just started a new piece for violin: the Prelude section of Bach's Partita No. 3 in E major. It's got some tricky string crossings, but it's one of my favorite pieces so I'm determined to figure it out someday.

October 20th: I found this neat coloring book in a little shop in Cannon Beach, OR, and I liked it so much I bought it. It's called 'Lots of things to find and color' by Stella Baggott and is full of all sorts of neat illustrations with fun directions for each page. There were a few more similar coloring books...I had a hard time buying just one!