Marvelous Monday

Today is a day that makes one wake up and feel happy to live in Minnesota.  It's 6 p.m. right now, and I just walked home from work, partly because I am sans vehicle but mostly because it is a heavenly beautiful day.  It's 70 degrees and the sky is a perfecto September blue and there's a light breeze.  Kids are playing football at neighborhood parks.  It's the best kind of fall.

With that spring in my step, I'll take a cue from my friend Nathalia and try another Marvelous Monday post this week.  It shouldn't come as a surprise that I like the exercise of drumming up five marvelous items to note about the day - especially a Monday.

1) Whenever I am home by this hour on a weeknight, I like to try a new recipe - or at the very least, cook a recipe.  I see them as fun mini-projects and mini-adventures to try, even though 90 percent of my favorite recipes year-round are built around the same theme - beans + onion + garlic + other vegetable + cumin + chili powder + complex grain. 

Tonight is not too different, although it's a totally new recipe for me.  I'm roasting butternut squash and pumpkin from last week's CSA box and then making pumpkin and black bean soup.  There's nothing magic about this - really, google "pumpkin black bean soup" and you'll get something close to what I'll be eating for dinner.  But it marks my first foray into roasting.  If it's a success, A) I won't keep Whole Foods in business due to my butternut squash soup consumption alone and B) preparing a butternut squash for a dish will no longer feel like a grueling endurance event.

The squash and pumpkin are in the oven and just starting to smell good.  I could get used to this.

2) As mentioned, the walk home was gorgeous.  I got to meander along one of my favorite stretches in the Twin Cities, the section of the Summit Avenue boulevard that ducks into a tunnel of lilac bushes by Lexington.  In the spring, it smells amazing, but year-round, it's a peaceful little trail that is literally a stone's toss from traffic but feels in the middle of nowhere.  

3) Outside that little dirt trail, the sunlight was streaming in a way that only fall afternoon sun can do.  And the first yellow leaf of the season grabbed my attention! I apologize in advance for posting too many photos of leaves.  I will try to curtail this as much as possible but can't make any promises.

4) Two Cryptoquip puzzles in one day!  I love these guys.  I did the first word puzzle from yesterday's paper at breakfast and will do the puzzle from today's paper before bed.  Wild!!

5) I saved my favorite for last.  Given what I have learned about writing for the internet, this is probably a major mistake.  But if you read this far, consider this your reward!  At my alma mater, I stumbled on an exhibit today: a collection of several dozen baby pictures, hanging on a wall facing the door of a building.  I looked closer and saw that it was members of the new Class of 2015 - people who are in their first weeks on campus at my alma mater. 

Underneath each photo was a message from the student's parents, blessing the next four years of their lives.  Their parents are proud of them, they love them, and they miss them. I read message after message.  I could have read them over and over.

This was my favorite:

"'You are a child of the universe,

no less than the trees and the stars,

you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear for you,

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.'

-Max Ehrmann

Love YOU, Sparkly Unicorn."

I hope Sparkly Unicorn is having his or her own Marvelous Monday.