Just as I was getting ready for bed last night, I noticed something odd right next to my pillow. I flipped on the lights to find this little guy punching the air: 347 353 357

186|150 204|150 My dear readers, I’d like to introduce you to the Great Pumpkin Experiment of 2007. This all started a few weeks ago when Aaron found a cookbook at the store. Little did I know, Aaron is quite the fan of pumpkin confections, and this book was certainly full of recipes for them. With the help of Todd , we selected the appropriately named recipe for Great Pumpkin Cookies to launch the experiment.

Last week, I made my first-ever batch of what I nicknamed “devil cookies.” The name was originally inspired by the sheer number of processes involved: making the dough, making the filling, chilling each, then rolling out the dough, adding the filling, rolling all that up and freezing, then slicing and finally baking. Around six hours, start-to-finish. Well, the first set came out of the oven, and each of the three cookies in the center row was in the shape of the number 6.

It seems that Dr. Phillips over at Science@NASA was feeling particularly inspired by the upcoming lunar eclipse. A breeze touches the back of your neck, and you turn to see a pale full Moon rising into the night. Hmmm. The Moon could use a dash more color. You reach out, grab a handful of sunset, and drape the Moon with phantasmic light. Much better. Via DoseNation

Welcome! I’ve finally managed to get enough done with my WordPress customizations that I’m ready to make this site live to the big bad world, so here it is. I still have a few things I plan on tweaking, so don’t be surprised if you see some changes over the next few weeks. And maybe (just maybe), I’ll actually write some posts, too.

This site/blog/whatever isn’t even live yet, and I’m already very happy with WordPress. I’ve played with a few blogging systems in the past, and was never happy with any of them. Living in a Windows world, and running my own server, I never seemed to find any options I was really happy with. After buying the Xserve with Aaron, I started playing around with WordPress. Despite my complete inexperience with PHP, and my relative inexperience with Apache, it’s been a wonderful experience.

Slowdive’s Pygmalion certainly isn’t their most accessible album (not that I claim to know what that would be), but for those willing to brave the wall of sound, it can be quite rewarding. It’s easy to get lost in the acoustics and be lifted to another world. It’s as if Pygmalion is what you would hear if you could simplify each of the band’s members down to their musical essence.

Dear Amazon order 102-8547978-0520157, Why have you not shipped yet? I would have you already if I wasn’t too cheap to pay for shipping. Please ship today. Love, Mike