This weekend was Thanksgiving for my Canadian friends and family. I thought I’d challenge myself a little and spent Sunday afternoon attempting to bake a pumpkin pie. How were the results? I was pleased, especially for a first attempt.

The [recipes I followed for both filling and crust](http://www.pumpkinpatchesandmore.org/pumpkinpie.php) are easy to read and pretty straightforward. I still ran into a few gotchas, though; I’ll be noting those as I can. Read on…

Just saw this guy in the grass this morning, on my way to campus.

Who says you can’t get shallow depth of field out of a pocket camera?

We moved house a little over a week ago, and for the first time, it was to a completely unfurnished pad. My housemates had conspired to acquire common area furniture from various sources, and [Melina](http://nakedbydesign.wordpress.com/) found us a bunch of flat-pack desks for our bedrooms.

But I still needed to actually get a bed. Feeling inspired by the success of [my shelves from last summer](http://uwmike.com/articles/2007/06/24/shelving-project/) and the work of Matthias on a [construction lumber bed](http://woodgears.ca/bed/build.html), I purchased a mattress and decided to attempt another woodworking project. In the end, the cost was about $90 in materials, and 5 hours of time. Read on…

[Jeff](http://jeffaho.com/) had recently floated the idea of reversed sleep schedules. The advantage of studying all night and then sleeping during the day is, of course, the absence of many distractions during the wee hours. I was considering exploring more of a [biphasic approach](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep), but in the end it’s been more of a less complicated “sleep when tired” approach.

Anyhow, there was a bit of drama in our front hall yesterday morning:

Interestingly enough, Pico didn’t seem all that interested in actually gutting the little intruder. It was terrified and exhausted from being chased, but once backed into a corner, all it got was a bunch of swats and nasty scowls. So I scooped him up with a glass and deposited him outside on the other side of the street.

After another ten minutes of confused stalking about, Pico fell right asleep on the couch; I kind of wonder if she’s going to sleep a wink in the two weeks that I’ll have her over Christmas in Toronto.

John Marshall has posted some gorgeous snaps of his [2006 Wolf River trip](http://gallery.marshallweb.ca/albums/dominionday2006/). (I designed and host the site, but the artwork is all his…)