A dozen peeled and sliced apples (rome, cortland, macintosh, golden delicious)…

layered with cinnamon and piled high…

topped with brown sugar, flour, more cinnamon and cold butter.

40 minutes later…

seven (going on eight) days of gluttony.

We got a half a cord of wood delivered yesterday.

Only a third of it is seasoned, which we were disappointed to learn, but the truth is, we’ll probably use only a third this winter anyway.  That gives the rest of the wood another year to dry out.

Here’s the way they deliver it:

(by the time I got outside Anuj had already brought the seasoned wood inside the house, so this isn’t quite the entire pile)

And here’s the beginnings of Anuj’s stacked wood pile:

(this is the unseasoned stuff that will stay outside under a tarp for another year)

The pile got about four feet high by the time he was done.

The Berkshire Eagle’s got some video footage of Pittsfield’s new Beacon Cinema.



From what I can tell, it looks beautiful.  Pittsfiled needs its architecture to be revitalized on this level.  I think those are lofts on the upper levels.  The ground level is going to be the The Marketplace Cafe.

Now that the opening’s only a few weeks away, I can start guessing what our first movie will be….that new Nancy Meyers film starring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin as exes who fall back in love? (update: that comes out Christmas Day.  Damn.)  The Road? Precious?

What will we do if all they offer are movies like that John Cusack end-of-the-world thing?  Or Twilight: New Moon? Go and enjoy our pastries regardless?

This weekend is the 10th annual FilmColumbia Festival.   The festival is one of the most highly anticipated cultural events of the county (that’s county, folks, not country).  It was started in 2000 by the Chatham Film Club and is currently run by journalist and cinephile Peter Biskind.  This year they’ve got over 30 screenings, panels, readings and parties.

Here’s a peak at some of the lineup:

• Precious, early Oscar buzz, starring Mo’Nique, Mariah Carey, and newcomer Gabourey Sidibe.  Look for a HUGE feature on it in this week’s NYTimes Magazine.
• The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, Heath Ledger’s last (half-completed) film, directed by Terry Gilliam.  Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law complete Heath’s role in the second half of the film.
• The Men Who Stare At Goats, starring George Clooney.   What is this film? Is anyone as confused as I am? 
• The Maid, this year’s Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance.
• The White Ribbon, the latest from Michael Haneke, one of my favorite foreign filmmakers.
• An Education, Dogme 95 meets Nick Hornby.  Literally.

There’s also the Coen Brothers, Barack Obama, Queen Victoria and Doctors Without Borders. 

Anuj and I had a great time last year – we saw a few films, including The Class, one of our favorites of the year.

Screenings for this year’s festival start tomorrow night.  Go!  (Or should I say, “Come!”)

We have a good-sized field in our backyard that’s been growing wildflowers, grass, and weeds for the past two years.  There are several reasons the previous owners may have kept (or started) the field, rather than cutting it.  Our guess is money.  The cost to mow would be enormous.  If money wasn’t their primary reason for keeping the field, it was definitely ours.  There was no way we could incorporate all that land into our yard.  We have enough yard to mow as it is.  For the record, when you’re house-hunting in the country, don’t forget the lawn factor.  Sure, it’s great to have all that space to run around but you gotta tend it, too.  Do you have two-four hours a week to dedicate to pushing a mower up and down a hill?  No?  Well then you better have the money to pay someone else to.

Anyway, we figured there would come a point when the field needed to be cut, but we weren’t sure when, or how.  This summer it started looking pretty shaggy.  A few conversations with our neighbors and some friends in the area revealed that annual mowing was the norm.  Oops.  That meant we needed to get it cut by winter or else we’d have mini-trees by spring.  Next was finding a guy with a tractor.  Not exactly the most difficult task in Columbia County.  We looked up landscapers, property managers, and land-haulers in our local paper, and narrowed our list down to two that sounded reasonable.  Anuj called the first one and made an appointment for the next day.  The guy showed up, gave an estimate that fit within our budget (having never done this before, we were going off of a made-up figure) and we shook on it.  We never even called the second guy.

The next weekend, we arrived to find a brand new yard.  Our field was gone!  It was a shock, sort of like when your Dad shaves his beard and you don’t really recognize him for the next few days.  We walked down the hill into parts of the yard I had never stepped foot on – it felt like we were seeing our property for the first time.

Before brush hogging.  Or is it bush hogging?  We weren’t (and still aren’t) quite sure which it actually is:

After:

The picture doesn’t quite convey the descent of the land to the left.  But picture the former field as green as the rest of the yard.  Which do you like better?

Look who passed by Saturday!

The pics are kinda fuzzy as they were taken through our dining room window, but we were very happy to see these four guys (and gals) cross our newly cut field.

The one in front was biiig.

See the little white tails?

Single file…

Come back soon!

(I understand that not all deer are welcome as they can eat their way through gardens.  Because we don’t have any vegetable-bearing gardens, we’ll extend the invitation to return.)

Apartment Therapy’s food site The Kitchn has a lovely feature on Berkshire County resident and gardener extraordinaire Margaret Roach’s kitchen.  It’s cozy, homy (homey?) and filled with personal treasures.

I think I can smell the fresh tomato sauce coming through my monitor.

Check out her vegetable garden.

If you live in the area, you may have seen it yourself in August as part of this.

Who doesn’t love a pantry.

Blight? What blight?

I’ll be over by seven. 

More pics here.

Margaret’s gardening site here.

Fall festivals are in full swing, and the leaves are near peak color.  The air is crisp and cool, fresh apple cider’s in the fridge, I’m even wearing flannel.  This all means it is officially my favorite time of the year.

Two weeks ago we did our first apple picking of the season at Golden Harvest Farms.  No baked goods came of it – just some tart, sweet snacks for the next week – but rest assured there are more apples to come, and hopefully a crisp, crumble or even pie along with them.

If the apples look a little worse for wear, they are.  The area was hit with a bad hale storm which damaged a lot of them.  There were still good ones to be found – you just had to venture deeper into the orchard and push through some layers of branches to find them.

We finally got some light in our upstairs Jack n’ Jill bathroom.   A Jack n’ Jill, for those of you who may be wondering, is two bathrooms that share a tub/shower.  The tub/shower room is sandwiched between the two bathrooms, and in our case, is separated by pocket doors.  I hope that makes sense.

Moving on.  When we bought the house, the bathrooms looked like this:

Above the mirror, which you can’t see, was a horrible, dressing-room type light fixture.  You know the kind, with the four or five clear bulbs in a row?  When the room was painted, those babies came right down.  This left both the Jack and the Jill rooms without much light for the past year.  So I’ve been searching for the right fixture for the part of the bathroom with the window, let’s call this one Jill.

Jill has a sloped ceiling, which limited the size of the fixture we could get.

But we found it in Pottery Barn’s Mercer Horizontal.   Purchased on Ebay for about thirty dollars less than retail.  So I put Anuj to work.  It was slightly scary watching him handle live wires, but I was very proud of his newfound electrical skills.  He had to replace the light box, cut a circle out of the dry wall to make room for the new ‘pancake box’, shave the new wires, and then match them up to the ones coming out of the wall.  It only required two or three calls to my Dad (prompted by me) along the way.

Our tools – including the pancake box.

My electrician.

And…the finished product.

I know, I know, our camera is sort of terrible.