Happy Hobbit Day!

Happy Hobbit Day!

Saturday was Hobbit Day. Brandon and I celebrated by attempting to eat seven meals and going on an adventure.

The Day’s Menu:

Breakfast/Second Breakfast: Hot cereal (Sam), two baked potatoes (Bran). We got up kind of late, and therefore technically missed breakfast, but Bran claimed one of his baked potatoes counted for first breakfast and the other for second.

Elevensies: Chicken quesadilla (Split between us)

Luncheon: Salad, with chicken, beans, salsa, and cheese.

Afternoon Tea: Herbal tea (Sam), hot chocolate (Bran), and homemade pumpkin spice doughnuts.

Dinner: Pasta shells in Alfredo sauce

Supper: Bean and BBQ quesadilla (Split between us)

The making of the pumpkin spice doughnuts:

The pumpkin spice doughnuts cut out and ready for the frying pan. And yes, I wore my new apron. :) 

They may have started out pretty, but they turned out an ugly mess. I had a really hard time transferring the dough to the frying pan because it was so sticky. Obviously, I am not cut out to be a doughnut maker. At least, not a fried doughnut maker. Maybe my baked doughnuts would turn out better.  

But luckily, their taste was unaffected by their looks. They made an excellent addition to our afternoon tea.

I wish our meals could have been more authentic (you know, mushroom soup and bangers and mash type of food) but you do what you can with what you have. It was fun to eat kind of like a hobbit for a day, but I've decided I am definitely not a hobbit. I could not consume that much food on a regular basis. All our 'meals' were more of snacks really, otherwise we never would have made it. Well, I never would have made it. Bran maybe could of. He would love to eat like a hobbit all the time, if we could afford it. The thing is, he could do it and still look like a twig. Not a pound of excess fat on that boy. Unfair, isn't it?

Adventure

In order to fully celebrate hobbit day we went on an adventure: the Vaux Swift Watch.

             All the black specks in the pictures are birds (sorry, my camera isn't the best, but I tried).

     

 This phenomenon occurs in Portland every September at the William Chapman Elementary School. Brandon heard about it from one of his professors, so we decided to go. Basically, every year in late August/September thousands of Vaux's Swifts gather in the city as they prepare to migrate to Central America and Venezuela. They sometimes use chimneys as roosts and, apparently, are likely to return to the same roost every year. One swift population has been returning to the Chapman chimney since the 1980's. Its become a big local event and hundreds of people (really...tons. I only got the one picture of a very small portion of the crowd and I wish I had taken more) gather every night about an hour before sunset to watch these swifts enter the chimney for the night. It was pretty awesome. Everyone cheers and claps as these swifts dive and funnel into the chimney--its a bit like watching the nature channel Olympics, if such a thing existed. Sometimes there are hawks, which eat swifts, and the crowd boos or cheers at the ensuing battles. There was only one hawk when we were there, and he got chased away by the swifts at first. It looked like it would be a hawk-free night, but then he came out of nowhere. It was crazy! One minute, no hawk; the next, hawk! I think he got one because he flew away after that and didn't come back. Though maybe the swifts just managed to chase him away again.

It was a lot of fun watching the birds dive for the chimney, swirling like a mini tornado. I took a couple of videos, but all that you can see are black smudges really (again, I apologize for the lame camera). I posted the video below mostly so you could get a sense of the crowd ambiance, though it is cool to see the birds going in the chimney like backwards smoke. One guy behind us quoted Star Wars, which pretty much made my day.

Overall, Hobbit Day was a success. Cheers!

P.S. A Confession

Before I even knew what hobbits were, I used to be terrified of them. I blame it all on the horrendous animated movie The Hobbit (1977). I watched it as a child and I didn't remember anything about it, except that I hated it, and the main character made me cry. I remember being fully aware that there was something else in the movie that I was supposed to be scared of that lived in some creepy cave (Gollum, I later discovered), but that creature paled in comparison to the character I was supposed to like, namely Bilbo. Seriously. I was terrified of him. Nightmares and everything.
Like I said, I had no idea what the movie was or what it was even vaguely about. As I got older, I just had this dim recollection of a terrifying short, fat, hairy little character with big eyes and buck teeth. Luckily, when the Lord of the Rings movies came out, it was not tainted in the slightest by my childhood terror, and I fell in love with it all on my own. It wasn't until college when I saw the The Hobbit DVD on sale at Walmart that I realized who it was I had been so terrified of.

Ugh. This version still gives me the creeps.

So so so so so glad that Peter Jackson is doing The Hobbit. I can't wait for December!