October

For most of my life, October has been my favorite month. Partly this is because I love Halloween, and partly this is because October is the month that is supposed to be most definitively fall (not that this was usually the case when I was growing up in Texas.) For the four years I was in college in Baltimore and the six and a half years we lived in Missouri, I really did get to experience the kind of cooler- temperatures, leaves-changing-colors, decorative-gourds-everywhere kind of fall that I have always loved, even if I wasn't living it.

Colorado doesn't excel at fall the way some other places do– the temperatures have cooperated, but since it wasn't ever really that hot to begin with, the dip isn't that dramatic. And a lot of our trees don't change color. They're either evergreens or varieties that go from green to dead. But we do have aspens, and it's hard to overstate how gorgeous those guys are.

We used Oscar's fall break to travel to Telluride, which is better known for skiing and winter stuff but is absolutely gorgeous this time of year. We decided to stop at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, which was (more or less) on the way. This was the only national park in Colorado that we hadn't already visited, and it honestly did not occur to us until we got there that the government was shut down. The park (and other national parks) remained open, so we did decide to go on in, but it sounds like the rangers themselves are encouraging the government to close parks for safety reasons until the shutdown is over. (If you want to donate to the Ranger Emergency Relief Fund, you can do that here.)

Black Canyon is breathtaking, and we loved the awesome weirdness of being able to see and hear a river but being so far above it that it looks motionless. We also really enjoyed the Painted Dragons, even if the walk out to the vista was a little muddy.

Telluride itself was beautiful as well. We stayed next door in Mountain Village, which meant we got to take advantage of the free gondola to take us over the mountain into town. The views from both above and ground level were fantastic– box canyons are amazing that way. We had a pleasant day wandering around, though we ended up spending more time than expected in a book store when Oscar decided he wanted to camp out there indefinitely.

Right after fall break, Oscar's school had their middle school lit fair, which involves creating science fair-like boards about books. Oscar chose Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins, which my mom has been wanting him to read for eons. (Surprise! He loved it and ended up inhaling the entire series; it has replaced Harry Potter as his chronic rereading material of choice.) Along with this board, he made a bookmark, designed a Switch game based on the book, and wrote an interview with one of the characters, which he styled as a newspaper article.

The rest of the month was divided between the kitchen remodel and Halloween, which somehow got stretched across three consecutive Fridays. Oscar decided months ago that this would be the year of the apparently inevitable Harry Potter costume (so inevitable that my mother bought the pattern for his Hogwarts robe literally years ago). Mom did a gorgeous job with his robe, so it's nice that he got to wear it so many times.

We did a space-themed trunk for his school's trunk or treat, and my main takeaways are that it is possible to keep this process relatively cheap and that magnets are your best bet for attaching things to your car (two different kinds of tape totally failed us).

Oscar and I went to a mother-son Halloween party, where he danced until he dropped. Later that weekend, we got to decorate some pumpkins without getting our hands covered in pumpkins guts. And that was all BEFORE Halloween itself, which we celebrated with jack o'lantern pizzas and trick or treating with friends.

The kitchen remodel was not a down-to-the-studs occasion, but it was still pretty disruptive while we were without countertops or a sink. (We now have both countertops and a sink but no faucet.) Things have been going fairly smoothly (aside from the fact that someone stole one of our cabinet boxes from the warehouse?!), but this process has still reinforced that I want to do this kind of thing as rarely as possible. I'll post pictures next month when we have things like cabinet doors and running water in there again.

In this midst of all this, we did get to see a couple of lovely performances. The first was the symphony playing John Williams music, introduced by the author of his recent biography. This season of Pops will includes performances of Jurassic Park and The Empire Strikes Back, so they didn't play some of his biggest hits, but the selection was actually more interesting because of it. We also saw great comedy show by Sheng Wang on what it turns out is his first major theater tour. If you haven't seen his Netflix special "Sweet & Juicy," I highly recommend it– and we enjoyed the material he is doing now even more.

We also had our first medical situation with Nutmeg, who has developed something called a hygroma on her . . . elbow? (I never really know how to refer to doggo joints.) Hygromas are apparently common in big, bony dogs like her, and the treatment (beyond antibiotics to make sure there's no infection) is to just keep her on soft surfaces and protect it with an elbow pad, which is, let's face it, a hilarious accessory. Turtle, meanwhile, continues to navigate life as the older but substantially smaller sibling (she is now officially twice his size). He also got extra time with his friends at daycare while the work was happening in the kitchen, since having folks he doesn't know in the house tends to stress him out.

Books:

• Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green: Better known for his YA novels and his Vlogbrothers stuff, Green tackles adult nonfiction with the same energy and curiosity that he does those projects, which means that this book is engaging and occasionally educational. It's also fairly slight, as much a narrative of one guy's self-assigned research project as an actual examination of the history of TB. He touches on how systemic and institutional racism and classism have delayed and derailed efforts to fight TB globally, but these feel peripheral when ultimately they are in many ways the point.
• I Like to Watch by Lisa Nussbaum: This collection of essays tackles a lot of my favorite TV shows, but it also digs in to larger, often thorny cultural questions. Her essay about how to deal with the artwork of terrible men is nuanced and uncomfortable in ways that I found productive, if not always consistent with my own experiences and takes. Her profiles of Jenji Kohan and Ryan Murphy are especially interesting.
• The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker: The follow-up to her book Dietland, which I read over the summer, is very different in terms of genre and tone but no less interested in taking down the patriarchy. I enjoy Walker's style and found this book engaging, but I do think her editor needs to work on walking back some of her less subtle tendencies. Even for an allegory, this book is extremely "DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE? DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE POINT I AM TRYING TO MAKE?" at times.

TV Shows:

• Only Murders in the Building: You know, when this show first started, I said to someone that I had no idea who the target audience was. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez? It made no sense. And now we're five seasons in and I can no longer imagine a world where they aren't besties. The threat of losing the Arconia and their relationships with each other really bring some depth to this season, which is helpful, because it has the silliest mystery yet.
• Peacemaker, season 2: Just as gory and goofy as season 1, but with deeper emotional resonance. (That feels like a weird thing to say about a Suicide Squad spinoff, but there we are.) Bummed to learn that they aren't planning another season of this one, because this is an ensemble that I really want to see more of.
• The Diplomat, season 3: I was so tempted to binge this entire season in one night. (I restrained myself and only watched four episodes the day it dropped.) Things have gotten downright silly in terms of the political plots, but since the heart of the show has always been the relationship between Kate and Hal, this season ends up working better than it should.

Movies:

• Dead of Winter: This is an unexpected and effective little thriller that has the audacity to cast two middle-aged actresses as action movie hero and villain. Emma Thompson does her best Fargo impression (and mostly pulls it off!) as a recent widow who stumbles into a kidnapping plot masterminded by a desperate Judy Greer. (Honestly, I wish more filmmakers had the imagination to see what Judy Greer is capable of. Then again, I wish these filmmakers had had the imagination to come up with a title that doesn't sound like a cheap paperback.) The action gets a little convoluted, but the performances and the winter scenery are too interesting to look away from.
• The Woman in Cabin 10: Wow, is this a dumb movie. Luckily, it is only dumb for less than an hour and a half.
• Blue Moon: What a lovely little old-fashioned movie from Richard Linklater. Ethan Hawke is nearly unrecognizable as Lorenz Hart--partly because of (sometimes distracting) efforts to make him appear a foot shorter than he is, but mostly because he manages to maintain an incredible balance of bravura and vulnerability throughout the film. He has something like 80% of the dialogue, but his supporting cast is also very impressive, especially Andrew Scott. (To be fair, when am I not impressed by Andrew Scott?)

Stitching updates! I finished my second and final draft of the whitework bellpull I first started in August. Once I got the hang of these stitches, it actually went really quickly, and I'm happy with how it turned out. I also spent a weekend at a stitch-in here in the Springs, and I alternated between trying to catch up on the temperature stitch and get out ahead of Christmas stitches. I also got to sit and chat with other stitchers from the region (which extends from the Canadian border to the Mexican border because while the Rocky Mountains are big, the populations of the states around the mountains are not). I came home with one finished Christmas tree, a bunch of new thread, and a few other stitching accoutrements, so on the whole it was a very worthwhile weekend.