mid-October is SLOW

It's been raining and sleeting for days, 'just been dreary. October is like being in a waiting mode for winter to come. Many people are getting their snow tires on and the weather is definitely colder. I'm waiting on the condo sale like this picture shows.
 

early snow?

I thought we'd have an early snowfall this year, like... today, this Sunday. At 3 a.m. a little snow fell, but not enough to stick around.

 

Slumber Party with Jasmine

Jasmine and I met up at East High Pool and went downtown for First Friday. We checked out many art galleries, got capuccino and ran into folks to say hello to. Then we came home by way of Freddie's to get baker's chocolate, almonds, eggs and splurge on lip gloss! (you gotta splurge on something when the PFD arrives). Here's Jasmine smacking those almonds into sliverines so we could make a special flour-less cake called caprese -- her family's secret recipe. (She's from milan and her parents own a bakery)


No, I'm not doing the Heimlich maneuver on myself.
My only real job was to break up the pieces of baker's chocolate, a finger workout.

She did all the work - melting the chocolate and mixing the sugar and almonds in.
Here's the cake out of the oven.

And here it is! caprese
it's the chocolate cake with powdered sugar to match the mountains with snow on top.

Chocolate Cake with Powered Sugar

Well, it's been a glorious fall -- about a month of golds, reds, yellows and pinks. The blueberries were small and plentiful this year, but they've turned to mush now as it's been frosty for two weeks, at least. The high bush cranberries are best to pick AFTER the frost, though, so I should get out to the bog nearby and pick away. The fall equinox is behind us, so we have fewer minutes every day of daylight. On Sept 21st we had just 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of dark. We're losing daylight noticeably now, Sun is rising around 8:15 a.m. and setting around 7 p.m. giving us 11 hours of daylight, a loss of around 6 minutes a day, and it just crashes downward till the winter solstice. Hopefully freeze-up will give us good conditions for ice skating and good snow for cross country skiing.
The snow is on the mountain tops again. The Chugach Mountains remind me of a chocolate bundt cake with powdered sugar on top. This is the view from my condo. Okay, I do need those bottom up blinds to blot out the nearby building.