Mac's Birthday weekend

Mac's birthday is October 25th, but this year he had to be at a conference that day, so we celebrated the weekend before. It was another beautiful fall weekend in NJ, so we took advantage and did some outdoor things along with some fun indoor things, too.

One of the highlights of the weekend was going to the Howell Living History Farm during their "pick your own popcorn" event. On our way out to the popcorn field, we came across this lovely scene of one of the farmers using a team of horses to plow a field.

Once we got to the field with the popcorn, we were pretty much given free rein to go through and pick any ears that we thought looked good. Mac and I found a good trove in the middle of the field. Mac didn't seem to have any problem getting his ears off the plant:

I, on the other hand had a little more of a struggle. Here's me posing for a photo:

Here's me after having to yank so hard on the ear that my sunglasses fell off:

Here's me laughing about the whole scene:

And here I am, finally victorious with my sunglasses in the right place and a big ear of popcorn!

We also got to see a demonstration of how to pop popcorn over an open fire (you need a popper to put it in), and learned about how popcorn is a specific type of corn that can't be eaten like a sweet corn because the hulls on each kernel are so hard. They said even the deer don't like to eat the popcorn growing in the field. But it's this extra hard hull that traps the steam inside and makes popcorn pop. On the flipside, you can't just dry out any ear of corn and try to pop it. It will basically just steam and never actually pop. We also walked around the rest of the farm and picked up a nice big pumpkin before we left.

On Saturday night we went to a student production of MacBeth on campus and Sunday morning we saved what we could of this half-moldy pumpkin:

It was a pumpkin that Mac had brought back from Maryland at the beginning of October and a teeny little spot on the back blossomed into quite a large moldy area, so we did a little surgery and cut off the entire back half of the pumpkin to end up with this guy:

It was quite a project, but I'm glad we saved what we could. Mac really wanted to dry it out in the oven to make it more of a shriveled pumpkin mask, so he took it from there. You can see the results of his efforts in the photos from the Pumpkin Carving Party.

Also on Sunday we went to a curator-led tour of an exhibit of Hogarth prints that's up at Firestone Library and after that we had a wonderful dinner at a local Indian restaurant. It turned out to be a wonderful, cultural, indoor, outdoor adventure of a weekend. I'm bummed I couldn't celebrate Mac's birthday with him on his actual birthday, but I think we did a pretty good job of making him feel special before he left for his conference.