I tend to spend most of my weekends cooking, partly because I like food and partly because there is really not much else to do. Today I have made brownies, macaroni and cheese, and I've got a pot of butternut squash soup on the stove.




I will be going over to my friend Stephanie's tonight to watch non-scary movies with her and one of her co-workers who joined the community band last night. We don't want to hang out downtown with all the drunk morons that populate this town. So we will watch silly movies and eat brownies instead.

(The pan is getting chipped paint on the bottom, hence the waxed paper. I don't want bits of Teflon in my baked goods.)



This is the soup, all finished. I'm not particularly hungry but it smells amazing and looks beautiful so I had to try a bit. I can really taste the roasted garlic and it is delicious.

(No picture of the macaroni and cheese, I ate it for lunch.)

It is still rather fall-ish weather here, which people who have been here longer than me say is quite unusual - last year there was a snowstorm on November 1st, whereas now we are only maybe going to be getting some rain on Sunday.

My dad visited at the beginning of the month and I was able to take a few days off, so we went out to Lake Louise one day. You really don't need more than a day in Lake Louise, it is very small and there's not much there and groceries are so overpriced for the tourists that the local discount (for which Banff apparently qualifies - we stopped in to get drinks) is about 50%.

Anyway, it was pretty but you can't really stare at lakes and mountains all day.

This is the Lake Louise classic postcard picture and though it is kind of cheesy in that regard, the way the mountains and sky reflect in the freakishly blue water is pretty cool.

Some of the white part of the mountains there is actually a huge glacier.

Lake Moraine is around the other side of the mountain on the left in the first picture.



It looked rather gloomy from the water level, but there was a giant pile of rocks you could climb and from the top it looked much nicer.

Actually in this picture it looks more like a freakishly blue river, but it really is a lake. You can rent canoes and paddle around the lake, though there were not a whole lot of people doing this in October.

Two weeks ago I took a hike out to the Hoodoos, which are a rock formation caused by some kinds of stone eroding faster than others. They are not really all that interesting to look at, which is unfortunate, but the walk there is very nice.



Even that early, the very shallow parts of the Bow River are freezing over a bit. There were some areas with large sheets of ice tilted in the water.

Once when I was little, when we were at my great-aunt and -uncle's cottage, I saw Lake Erie like this. My dad and I built an ice house out of the giant sheets of ice. I guess larger bodies of water make larger sheets of ice.

The hike to the Hoodoos takes you around the other side of Cascade Mountain, Mount Rundle and Tunnel Mountain.

This is Cascade from the side where you can't see where the cascade that is was named for used to be, before it dried up.

I thought I took a picture of Rundle, which is very pointy when seen from town but as you go around it it turns into more of a mountain range with lots of little triangular points arising from a giant chunk of rock.

And so ends my experiment with using the Insert Photo function of blogger. It works pretty well, though it always puts the pictures at the top of the post and I have to cut and paste it in where I want it. Also, I am now done eating my soup and it is as delicious as it smelled.