Reading this week:

• Development Aid Confronts Politics: The Almost Revolution by Thomas Carothers and Diane de Gramont

It is fall in New England so we went apple picking. Couple of points here. First, as you can tell from the title of this post including the word “Redux,” this was an event we also did last year, when it was also fall in New England (being a year ago, you understand). Despite the similarities in the season, and despite the fact that I again busted out my super sweet safari jacket (modelled above), there were a number of differences. I have not recently read any Steinbeck, so I didn’t ponder as closely how our adventure related to the plight of the American worker. I also haven’t talked about Marx nearly as much in the past few months as I did in the fall of last year. I feel very overworked this year; maybe the decline of Marx in my life and the increase in work is related.

The most significant difference between last year and this year, however, is the huge difference in the use of “we” in the sentence “we went apple picking.” Last year we got official funding from Yale to go on a group-bonding expedition, and so the we was a whole host of people. This year, “we” includes only myself and my super amazing awesome girlfriend, who is awesome, and who totally exists, despite the fact I felt weird about posting pictures of her here because I haven’t asked her about it. Unlike me, who is from the Southern land of Maryland, she is from New England, up in Massachusetts, and she goes apple picking every year. It is a pandemic and all, which is why we couldn’t go with all of our closest friends like we did last year, but going apple picking was a nice respite from the looming threat of death and a lifetime of heart damage.

We were not the only ones who felt this way! As you can’t see from the picture above (I really promise I was not the only person in the apple orchard that day), a number of people were there that day picking apples. But that’s not all! The orchard also had pears (I am fairly surprised by the wide range of fruit that grows up here in the frigid reaches of Connecticut), and people (including us) were picking those too. They had a corn maze that didn’t strike us as worth $7, but others disagreed. So it was a grand ole day staying warily apart from other people in a field as we picked various fruits off of trees. We filled up a whole bag, and took various photos so we can someday admire how young and sprightly we once were. Here, the super amazing girlfriend I have mentioned so often took an action shot of me picking an apple:

This was all very fun! We had a great time. I wish I had written this blog post closer to the actual event so I could relay to you more intimate details, instead of what I currently have, which is a hazy memory of having a really nice day outside among some trees.

This apple picking is a healthy activity, involving healthy fruit and walking outside in the fresh air, so we had to rectify that with a trip to the farm store on the way out. This particular farm store was much more of a supermarket, but it had cider donuts and cider and that is what we were there for so we were quite successful in that. I took two pictures of things that were funny:

The image on the left I enjoy because it makes me feel bad for the plantains, whom I am sure would like to be defined as something other than what they are not. And as a fan of plantains, I want to defend them here by saying if they’re not as sweet, they’re just as nice. The image on the right is an AMERICAN chicken pie, which is not the funny part. The funny part is right under that label, which I hope you can see, which says NO VEGETABLES, which I think is just a standard food label but I like to think it speaks to the AMERICANness of the pie.

After all this we went home. Please stick with me, I will write better blog posts in the future. I am quite swamped with work!!!