Pumpkin

Happy Thursday! I have a horrible pain right in my back. I'm thinking of not spending too much time on this because of it.

Second guitar class was today. Or. Hour and a half practice time I'm paying for was today. We have a list of chord progressions to learn, and so he went around listening to everyone do the farthest one down the list they could do. I was first or second so he was all "Ok, try the next one."

So I tried the next one for the next hour.

For the last half hour I played the "blues scale" in E.

Then we went home.

And for the full hour and a half, I listened to the life story of my new best friend, 9-Year-Old, who is in fact twelve. Srsly. His whole life. Like. Every part of it.

This week our numbers dwindled. So just me, 9-Year-Old, Quiet Girl, Punk Rock Kid, Blind Girl, Thinks She Can Play, College Guitarist (whom my mom picked out across the dark parking lot just based on my description), New Dad, Dad, Little Mexican Lady, Talky Uncle, and Youth Group Guy. Now that I think of it, New Dad might be Confused Dad, who was sitting behind me last week so I dunno.

Yeah it's thrilling.

So the heat wave ended and then it rained a couple nights, which was pleasant. Seems like it'll be sunny for a while, now, but freezing. Fall flipped a switch.

So the other day I walked to the thrift store and picked up The Essential Bob Dylan 2-disc Special Limited Edition Digitally Remastered Classics on 2 CDs! for $2.25. Continued on to Longs for evaporated milk, a pie crust, and cream cheese. Continued back around to the pumpkin patch and selected a pumpkin for the kill. Then I walked home with all my treasures.

Cooking a pumpkin is rather easy. I chose the steaming method, which was simple. Then it needed to be blended, which was not as simple. Then it went into a pie mix and into some crusts. The store-bought one burn burn burned, which made me sad because I love a pumpkin pie with a graham cracker crust*. The second one was an emergency pie because we had a whole pie's worth of pumpkin filling left over. Luckily I had that cream cheese which is 1/3 of the world's best pastry dough.

The emergency pie is a little spicy (I doubled all the spices), a little fluffy (for denser pie use less evaporated milk and only three eggs), and somewhat lacking in pumpkin flavor (? I totes put that pumpkin in there). But otherwise it is a success.

*The last time I attempted a pumpkin pie was a few years back. I used canned pumpkin and tried to build a graham cracker crust from scratch, and overall it was a disaster. I decided to stick to apple from then on. But this week was a pumpkin week.

It's really hard not to type pumpking.

That's about all I can remember about this week. Other than listening to 99.9 KTYD nonstop. Check it out. It'll change your life.

Honestly. I just went there to gather the link and they're playing the Beatles. And right at midnight there's usually a whole Beatles set, like they can't figure out how best to handle heir sudden lack of a DJ. Now it's playing Queen. Perfect station.

-Steph