It’s that time of the year again. The air is cool, the wind a little crisp. This morning at six, it was still dark out.

This time of the year is always tinged with a bit of sadness. No more summer. No more heat. No more picnics at Two Lights. Bummer.

But as we get closer to Halloween and the first days of wearing sweaters, I start to perk up a bit. It’s apple season! Time to pile in the car and take Dash out for his first orchard excursion. That in itself would have been an easy task, though we wanted to find an organic orchard that was within an hour of Portland. I was surprised at how difficult that turned out to be. There are only two.

Two.

Out of about twenty-one.

That means nineteen orchards within an hour of us are spraying their apples with pesticides. That sucks. But that is not the point of this so I’ll let it go. For now.

We (Neil, Dash, me, and my parents, aka Meme and Bum) drove over to Raven Hill Orchard in East Waterboro on Sunday. (They don’t have a website yet, so no link! But see here for further information about how to find them.)

They’re in their first year of production and it’s a beautiful little spot. Go go go if you’re thinking about going. And if you’re not thinking about going, what’s your problem?
Go! You don’t even have to pick apples. You could just hang out in their coffee shop and laugh at your lame apple picking friends. You know, there’s something for everyone.

Anyway, as it turned out, Dash didn’t really want to pick apples. Go figure. What he elected to do was sleep. Through the entire two hours we were there. But the rest of us had a great time picking a few common varieties and lots of tasty heirloom apples.

Hudson’s Golden Gem, anyone?

Holiday gift spoiler alert!!

This is going to make some mighty fine apple butter for someone’s Christmas toast.

We pullled it off! We hosted our first ever house concert last night, though you wouldn’t know it today—aside from having all our furniture in new and exciting places, and what with the exhaustion we’re all feeling. As in, can’t drag butt off the couch, can barely reheat leftover Indian food for lunch, kind of exhaustion.

Our friends Peter and Sally are on a national tour promoting Sally’s album and we managed to convince them to play that hot Portland nightspot known as “Tonya and Neil’s Living Room.” Amazingly, they were happy to do it, which meant, shit, we have a ton of work to do! Invites went out, a menu was planned, and when they pulled in town on Wednesday with their dog, Sampson, we were ready to go.

I let Neil rearrange my (my!) living room and dining room to accommodate his vision for the show, and though I disagreed then, I’m willing to admit publically that he was right. His vision involved a lot of furniture moving but it ended up creating the ultimate salon setting for the show. A setting that will not show well in my photos below. Somewhat because we had a small house filled with people and therefore could not move into the proper photo-taking positions, but mostly because I’m a bad photographer. There, I said it.

So the scene was set, food and drink was put out (including some generous donations by Maple’s Organics and Zarra’s Monumental Coffee House—Thank You!), and the house filled with people. Friends, I’m so impressed! Thank you for coming and making for one truly lovely evening of music and laughter. Also impressive? I think your combined donations to the band amounted to more than some of their gigs have paid. For real. You are very generous and I (and they) thank you!

Here are some rather bad pictures from the evening. Some funky setting on my camera takes these fuzzy shots which I kind of like and mostly don’t.

Sally and Peter play on our poorly lit stage.
The sound was incredible which had a whole lot to do with their amazing talent and a just a teeny bit to do with the acoustics in our house. I’m thinking about hiring them on as our house band. Actually, I’m thinking of hiring them to be our kitchen help, too. Aside from their musical abilities, they cook and clean like dream houseguests. Love that!

One side of the living room and a glimpse of the dining room. I swear it was more crowded than this makes it look.

And just one more photo from last night, which I like to call, “Sweet Potatoes Is Good.”

Welcome back. I trust we all had a nice Labor Day weekend? It was gorgeous here, the perfect “end” to the summer.
Neil spent a lot of time killing brain cells while staining our deck and I spent an equal amount of time avoiding those fumes with Dash in-hand. Let’s see… what else? We had a great, totally unplanned barbecue with some good friends. Rowdy with all of us playing croquet, horseballs, and attempting to ride a unicycle. There was much wine and there may have been cigars. I’m not sayin’.

Also, you might have noticed I added these little chicklets under each post so you can share with others at Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, and others. What do you think? Is it overkill? Are they too big? Do you even care?
I haven’t made up my mind about them yet so I welcome your feedback.
Thanks friends!

Yesterday, after picking up Neil in the park and hanging out with Kristie and Ren while they worked on the new Maple’s location, we all walked down to this new bookstore in town to catch the book signing for

Rabelais was the perfect spot for Margaret’s book to make its debut.
Surrounded by cookbooks, friends, fans of goats, fans of slow cooking, wine, goat cheese (and actual goat, which I did not try), you really can’t go wrong.

Only one live goat was in attendance. He was happily munching hay and posing for pictures out in front of the shop.

I’m really kicking myself for this one, but probably it was the wine. Yeah, it was the wine that distracted me and kept me from getting THE photo of the night. A group of monks walked by the shop, through the crowd around the goat, on their way to who-knows-where. There’s no shortage of good restaurants in the neighborhood, so maybe it was just supper time for monks. Anyway, it was kind of a blessing on the event and the book, I think. If anyone managed to get a shot of them, let me know.

And because it’s so hard to post and not share Dash with you, here is his reaction to the goat.

I think he likes him.

UPDATE: oops. i think the goat was a she.

…And we’re back. Doesn’t it always feel so good to get home after a vacation? We enjoyed every minute of being away but still, you just can’t beat the rush of driving over the bridge into Maine. Not to mention sleeping in our own bed.

As far as my worries of travelling with Dash? Completely unfounded. Aside from the car ride (more on that below) he was the best little traveller ever there was. We packed single servings of applesauce and frozen cubes of sweet potato in a dorky canvas cooler (does everyone get at least one of these courtesy of their workplace? is it law or something?) and lugged it around with us while we hopped between friend’s houses. Since he mainly eats just twice a day (like a pet!) we didn’t have to carry any of it with us during the day. Just a bag of Cheerio-like cereal to fend off the hunger cranks (works for both mom and baby).

Dash LOVED the city. Loved it. He seems to really like meeting new people, seeing new things, and is apparently just fine with sleeping in strange beds. This will come in handy in his early 20’s. He charmed nearly everyone he met (typical), even on the subway. We loved watching people who were all caught up in their days, stressed over work, relationships, whatever, see Dash and give him these huge smiles. There were a couple moments where I was all caught up with something (probably praying we had just gotten on the right train and weren’t going to have to get off at the next stop to hop on one going in the opposite direction, because yes, that did happen) and wasn’t paying attention, when I’d realized people were smiling all around me. It’s kind of awesome (in the true sense of the word) to realize they’re all looking at Dash. It’s called charisma, and this kid’s got it. Very cool to see in action.

I was going to write out the details of our days—what we did, where we ate, what we bought—but then I realized it’s kind of boring. We walked around the city, visited with friends we rarely see, ate delicious food, bought pretty dresses for me. That’s it in a nutshell. What i’d rather say is that I learned two very important lessons on this trip.

One. Though I was pretty focused on taking Neil to Brooklyn to show him where I lived and breathed back before he knew me, I decided to skip that trip entirely. I realized that it was really more of a nostalgia tour for myself and that I really didn’t need it. Once I let go of the idea, I relaxed more into the trip and enjoyed our days of somewhat aimless roaming. All in all, I think we enjoyed that much more than we would have had I made us spend an entire day in Brooklyn while I narrated, “I ate lunch there once,” or “I know Smiling Pizza looks like an innocent pizza place but really they just want to smile and oggle your breasts.” By spending our days covering more territory than just Brooklyn, I was able to narrate like this: “that’s where Steve Buscemi stared at Jes’s ankles like he wanted to eat them,” and “that’s where Aaron and I saw the dead guy.” Much more interesting material.

Two. Dash likes Cheerios. A lot. And when he wakes up crying three hours into the car ride, if I move to the backseat and feed him 43 Cheerios one by one, he stops crying. Good to know.