Summery Summary

A few last notes on how I spent my summer:

We baked a black forest cake, molasses cookies, and focaccia. The black forest cake had issues with the cake – we overwhipped the egg whites and they didn’t fold into the batter super well – though the whipped cream and sour cherry filling were good. I’m still looking for a really good chocolate cake recipe (I also haven’t found my go to brownie recipe). I’ve baked the molasses cookies a half dozen times now, so those were fine. The focaccia was another first time bake, and it seemed to work. Maybe the crumb structure could have been a little more open, but it rose okay and tasted good. It was very crispy right after baking and softened up overnight.

Focaccia

I cross stitched a birth announcement that I have no use for right now, and started another project featuring landmarks in Singapore. While doing so, I made it to episode 113 (out of 141) of campaign 2 of Critical Role, but I’m now stalled around episode 124 because I’m currently not cross stitching while trying to write somewhere between half and most of a book in a month (hello, NaNoWriMo).

We hiked some nearby trails and state parks, saw sheep at a farm, and attended an outdoor art installation at a local land preserve. Despite living where we’ve been for over a decade, we hadn’t done much exploration of some of the local trails just a few miles from our house. Most community trails aren’t anything super amazing to write home about, but they’re close, and they’re great for a quick afternoon or weekend hike. They range from a mile or two up to over five miles, and there are even a few trails that connect to or loop through surrounding towns. One day when we had some time to spare outside of Boston, we paid a visit to the Mount Auburn Cemetery, resting place of Dorothea Dix, Bernard Malamud, Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Buckminster Fuller, Winslow Homer, and many others, and then walked to a park close by.

Boston skyline from the Mount Auburn cemetery

Thanks to the public library, I got to solve some puzzles for free, including one from the world’s hardest puzzle series. Those are the ones that are double sided and cut so that the pieces have no “front” or “back” side. Last time was the 1001 dalmatians that took 1001 nights to solve. This time was a jungle scene that was definitely harder than a “normal” puzzle but nowhere near as difficult as the dalmatians. We also did a Massachusetts puzzle from White Mountain puzzles, a chocolate puzzle that we picked up for free, and a Star Wars puzzle, another free acquisition.

Additionally, sometime in the summer I found out that the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship is a thing. There, one of the rounds in the competition is to fix a 500 piece puzzle in less than 90 minutes, with the fastest puzzlers completing the puzzle in less than half an hour. I was curious to try it for myself, so I attempted it first with a puzzle of a giant girl holding a jump rope standing over a bridge with some buildings in the background. There weren’t many colors or obvious features in this puzzle, so I didn’t end up finishing this one in 90 minutes. What I had done in that time is shown in the figure below, and I took another half hour to complete it. I tried again with a puzzle of a city street, and this time I finished the puzzle in 1:28:32 with just under a minute and a half to spare.

Jigsaw puzzles - clockwise from top left: world's hardest jigsaw puzzle - jungle animals edition, chocolate, giant jump rope girl, and city street

Although the public library here doesn’t have as many non-book/video offerings as the Ann Arbor District Library, they do have a telescope, which we borrowed to try out. Our constellation identification wasn’t super successful, but we got a pretty good look at the moon as it waxed over a period of a couple weeks. I can actually identify craters in photos taken with my 250mm lens, but the telescope had even more magnification than my camera, so that was cool. And finally, we repainted most of our sad looking deck, at least as much as we could until we ran out of paint.