A Mild Uproar of Fun

The Best of October

While work kept me busy in October, it didn’t keep me from enjoying my favorite month of the year. So here are a few of the highlights:

1. Oak Park Farmer’s Market

For the second time this year, Apryl and I traveled out to my favorite Chicago suburb to take in the Oak Park Farmer’s Market before the end of the season. This time we went with our friends Trey and Rachel and enjoyed some of those famous donuts as well as Wisconsin cheese. Most importantly, we picked through a variety of apples to use for our first entry in the Bucktown Apple Pie Contest.

More on that in a bit.

2. Nosferatu w/ Tortoise at the Chicago Symphony Center

The day before the apple pie contest, Apryl and I ventured downtown to the beautiful Chicago Symphony Center to see a screening of the silent horror classic, Nosferatu. Tortoise, the post-rock legends from Chicago, performed the soundtrack for the film live on stage. There were a few miscues (mostly in the beginning), but overall we thought Tortoise did a good job providing the right amount of creepy vibe for this timeless vampire tale.

Best of all, the event was free!

3. Apple Pie Contest

Now, this really deserves its own post, but Apryl decided to enter the 2007 Bucktown Apple Pie Contest. You may recall our post from 2006 when we took in the event as a non-participant. Well, this time we decided to join in on the fun and bake our own pie. Actually, Apryl did most of the baking, but I was a helpful assistant. This was Apryl’s first apple pie in years so she wasn’t too excited about the end result, but I ate it up. Well, not right away.

We didn’t have time to bake a practice pie. In order to enter the contest, you had to bake two identical pies, one to be judged by its appearance and one judged for its taste. By the time we had two baked pies, it was time to turn them in across the street at the Holstein Field House. For doing so, we were given a gift, which included free tickets for pie as well as this awesome coffee cup!

Below are a few photos from the event:

Well, we didn’t win any of the awards you see above, but it was still a lot fun being a part of it all. Even our friends Trey, Rachel, and Tim came by to check it out. Each in the gang had 6 food tickets ($5 for non-participants) which got them each 3 slices of apple pie.

Once everyone had used up all their tickets, we took everyone’s slices back to our apartment where everyone shared each other’s picks over ice cream and coffee.

Yep, a good day!

4. Pumpkin Carving Contest

We didn’t attempt this our first year in Chicago, but we did have a pumpkin carving contest when we were living in Memphis and wanted to start up the tradition here as well. In all, we had eight folks that night (10 including us) scraping out pumpkin guts all over our living room floor (don’t worry, we were prepared). Prizes were given out to Scariest, Most Creative, and Best Overall.

The winners: Trey carves his first ever pumpkin(!) and wins Scariest.

Michael wins Most Creative with his design of a man about to get it from both a knife-wielding maniac and a figure with a chainsaw. See below:

Anna wins Best Overall with her difficult cat in the window carving. Below:

More photos from the night can be seen here.

5. Horror Movies

Starting on the 13th day before Halloween, I spent nearly every day watching a scary movie, many of which were rented from my favorite video store, Odd Obsession. A few of the flicks I watched were The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Beyond, Equinox (recommended by Trey), Inferno, Tourist Trap, Rituals (aka The Creeper), Demons, and Alice, Sweet Alice.

6. Halloween

My favorite holiday! Now since I can’t follow around my nephews and niece trick or treating, the next best thing is having a horror movie marathon at home. I picked out several flicks as did my friend Trey who came over to share the evening with me. Unfortunately, Apryl had to go to class that night. During the day, I had gotten a pretty gruesome skeleton costume, which I dressed up in to answer the door throughout the night. I actually scared one little kid but not before she got her candy. (Sorry, there are no photos of me in this costume.) It was great that for the second year in a row, we got a lot of children ringing our bell. Trey helped out a lot with the door since I was also making homemade pizza and Halloween cookies, and it took way too long to get in and out of that costume. Plus, it was really hard to see where I was going in that thing. During the day, I had to practice getting to the front door, studying how many steps there were up and down the stairs. We watched several of Trey’s selections including the Halloween episode of The Adventures of Pete & Pete and a Mario Bava short film called A Drop of Water.

Sadly, we got a phone call from Trey’s wife Rachel, who was coming over on her bike that night, telling us that she had been struck by a car and wasn’t sure where she was. Trey and I hopped in my car and found her a few blocks shy from our apartment. Luckily, she wasn’t hurt, only a little bruised and certainly shaken up. Afterwards, we called it an early night. I drove the two of them home, watched my ritual viewing of Night of the Living Dead, and went to bed.

The next day the realization that October was over settled in and left me depressed for the entire day.

Up next, The Holidays

First things first, Happy New Year!

Now, with that being said, I’m sure that there are many out there who are wondering where the heck we’ve been. Well, believe me, it would take too much space (and energy) to properly fill you in, so I will stick with the highlights:

Part 1: Work

There has been lots of work, which has made my mom nervous that she’s lost us to Chicago forever. In the past months, I have worked in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Omaha, Iowa City, Philadelphia, and, my favorite, San Francisco.

Oh, how I loved San Francisco. I wish I could have spent a week there. (Hopefully, Apryl and I will get the chance to visit the city together sometime in the near future.) The funny thing is that we really didn’t even do that much, except walk around, starting on Market St. up to the districts SOMA, Chinatown, and North Beach. Still, I was just fascinated with the beautiful city and had a time visiting the Beat Museum, City Lights Bookstore, Chinatown, and the sea lions at Fisherman’s Wharf.

Most bizarre sighting, a farmer’s market I visited on the morning of our last day in town, where live poultry was being sold from the back of a pickup truck. The farmer (or whoever he was) would take hens out of a wooden cage, tie their legs together, stick them in a brown paper bag, and punch a small hole in the bag with his finger so that the birds could breathe. Surprising (at least, to me) is how popular these birds were, with a long steady line. I wasn’t bold enough to snap a photo of this odd practice. Not sure I want that keepsake.

- More photos of the San Francisco trip can be found here.

In town, I have worked on several segments for the Oprah show, including one of those Dr. Oz episodes. If you have a Myspace account, you’re fully aware that one of these segments was with Stacy London, who has a show Apryl loves on TLC called What Not To Wear. And I am happy to report that London was quite charming and sweet. A month after the shoot, Apryl and I caught the episode on TV, and I was surprised to see how little of what we shot during that 13-hour day was used in the final program.

Also, I got to work on an episode of the HGTV series Designed To Sell as well as a live ESPN shoot with Mike Ditka at his restaurant in Chicago.

And, of course, I traveled to Philadelphia for another Thanksgiving week with the UCA/UDA cheerleaders. It was the warmest thanksgiving in Philadelphia in one hundred and six years. Below, I’m posing with the cheer escorts:

The really fun part of Philly came when I got back to Chicago and spent countless hours editing 10 hours of footage into 50 minutes. I think I gained 10 pounds from all the eggnog I consumed at the computer.

Up next, Part 2: The Best of October!