Gwen+Justin November 2024
Me and Gwen had an exciting month, starting with our first Halloween party in the new house, and ending with a just-us Thanksgiving break which was delightfully eventless.
Halloween went fantastic! I cooked a LOT including 7-11 inspired deep fried Taquitos (in the back, filled with nice yuba marinaded and seared with an asada sauce, fried chick’n wings bought from the Buddhist section of 99 Ranch, other fried vegan nuggets, a wonderfully sumptuous chili from always-reliable Nisha, and finally roasted figs and potatoes from the NYT, which had the figs rehydrate in tea for a nice complex flavor. Turnout was also nice, being the first time I’ve put my new Janelia friends alongside me+Gwen’s MD usuals. We all had plenty of enrichment as we painted ghosts and pumpkins from Michaels and showed people around the new house.
Liam and Soche came to visit the next weekend, providing me with my second ever college tour! I only ever went on one before I applied to schools, choosing to apply early on a complete whim, pretty much shooting as high as I thought I could on USNews ranking alone.. Liam and Owen are getting the full-suite jet-setting experience comparatively. We hit up GW and American which have surprisingly insular college campuses for being in DC- I especially liked how GW’s seems to ebb in and out of being a city campus. Lunch at DC Vegan, and back to my place for Liam for culture+cooking.
Me and Gwen also went to maybe the earliest Christmas market of all time at the Dulles Expo Center- I pass the sign with the listing for the upcoming weekend every day on my trip to work. There ended up being not really that much Christmas.. maybe 1/3 of the stalls and the rest seemed like traveling flavored olive oil and kitschy hot sauce salespeople that must follow as many expos as will take them. Preying on people who don’t know they can just.. put rosemary in olive oil themselves. Finally, though, I got a nice, huge, endgrain cutting board like I’ve been wanting. I was also intrigued by an older couple with a hickory syrup stand. It tasted nice and smokey, and I was wondering why people aren’t tapping them all the time until we got home and I saw that it was sugar syrup just blended with hickory bark.
We managed two more paddling outings before the cold really hit at the end of the month. I lobbied to go out even as the leaves fell and the birds left, because in the winter, other birds come in. Namely ducks- namely BUFFLEHEADS- my favorite duck. This story starts last January when me and Gwen started paying attention to birds, when we went to one of MD’s premier hotspots, Violette’s Locke, on the Potomac. We were having a great time following some of the great blue herons around, enchanted by such a cool animal we had no idea was as common as it is. While we were walking downriver, an old Russian lady with Swarovski binoculars told us about the buffa-la-eds around a river island and got frustrated with us when we couldn’t find them ourselves. Ever since then, we have missed every possible bufflehead we might have seen while the pictures on ebird of cute, iridescent, buffies taunted us. Our first weekend this month on the kayak was equally, devastatingly fruitless as I thought that there must be ducks roosting around the river islands around Algonkian park in VA, but we saw ZERO ducks. Consolation prize magestic eagle and our first winter wren of the season, flitting around some eroded branches.
On our next weekend though, we struck gold. Riverbend park, just upstream of the Great Falls Dam, was buffleheaven. I saw a couple dozen checklisted the previous morning, “just off the boat ramp,” and I hoped it wasn’t too good to be true. Dismayed when we didn’t see them, we paddled in anyways, seeing a couple of mergansers. But, then Gwen nervously said she saw a couple ducks by the opposite shore. A couple turned into 30! We paddled as close as we dared, and drifed sloooowly closer as I snapped pictures away until the bashful ducks flushed and flew- fortunately towards us where I could get some adorable flight pictures. Rince and repeat again, in the vain attempt that some river rocks might block their view of us.
The uncultured may think that the eagle above is cooler, but they are wrong.
Buffleheads are fairly solitary ducks, so seeing so many of them was so nice!
We also pulled in on Conn Island, where we saw abandoned boats and tents (how does somebody abandon a boat on a river island?). In my head I always imagine pulling off on one of these uninhabited river islands to be an edenic trip where all the animals hang out free from annoying people, but it usually just turns out to be bushwhacking and a normal number of birds. Just without the nice, convenient trail. At least at the tip we got a little-seen view of the Great Falls overlook platform. You’d never know there was a dramatic gorge just underneath! It also turned out that just underneath the dam was a huge roosting spot for geese, crows, mergansers, and even a swan that we saw and lost track of.
Great Falls Overlook from upriver
In unrelated bird news, me+G also took a watercolor class. I expected it to be a hands-on kind of tutorial for two, but when we got there, it turned out to be the kind of place where people drop off their kids to seal an hour alone. Not terrible, but it felt more like we were renting a piece of (nice) paper and some paints with a few pointers from instructors more busy with supervision. But, it was just the nudge I needed to buy some paints and get going on my own. Here is the first one I like enough to share of a Golden-Tailed Sapphire painted from a photo Gwen took in Peru.
Closing out the month, our Thanksgiving plans were cancelled owing to some family surgery. It turned out amazing despite (because of?) the cancelation as me and Gwen just COOKED AND STAYED HOME. We made BAKED POTATOES and FOCCACIA and LASAGNA. It was great. We watched movies, played all of Rise of the Golden Idol (awesome sequel to a great puzzle game), and only climbed on Sunday enough to get our shit together for the week after three days of nothing except buying our Christmas tree!
BREAD
Bonus! Our last Janelia D&D session featuring our first big combat and exciting plot developments. Featured: a make or break to-use-or-not-to-use-bardic-inspiration. Finally, all of me and Gwen’s Kickstarters and terrain purchases have been able to come into use :)
