Today is the last grasp of summer's fiery claws before it is finally dragged down and buried beneath the falling leaves. It's 24°C now, with a high of 29°C later today, but on Thursday the high is 21°C, and Saturday the high is 17°C. By next Tuesday, it'll be 11°C when I leave in the morning, which is my perfect morning weather. Rice, miso soup, and tea as part of my breakfast is way better in cold weather than in warm. I ordered some sealing wedges for my balcony door frame, since there's obvious light coming through at the bottom and I'll want to fix that before temperatures drop into the single digits.
This place is mine, now, so I have to fix these problems.

Had my housewarming on Saturday! I spent a big chunk of Friday and Saturday cooking various Rosh Hashanah-themed foods, so my housewarming had an
apple crumble, apples and honey,
braised leeks,
roasted beets,
tahini carrots, and challah that I bought from Whole Foods. I was really worried that I wouldn't have enough food, but there was plenty! And I have roughly twice as much booze as I started with. I mentioned that I was having dinner of leftovers and a friend said, "And washed down with twenty bottles of wine," which, you know...
My condo is open-plan, so I was a bit worried about how the party flow would shake out, but even though there were forty people who came (only about thirty at a time), there was plenty of room for separate conversations. Some people in the sunroom, some people around the dinner table, some people out on the balcony, some people around the kitchen island, some people by the sink, some people over by the stairs... It showed me that my place is good for hosting large groups and ther's plenty of spaces for people to congregate. And I don't even have all the chairs by the stairs, outside, or in the office yet!
Feeling pretty good about where I live now.

The title of this post isn't just due to the weather. On Sunday night I went over to
cjkarr's first horror movie night and we watched
The Wicker Man (1973), which I knew almost everything about but had never actually seen. I can see why it's so well-regarded now--the almost everything I knew did not include the plot twist at the end, and the film had a dream-like quality to some of the scenes that enhanced the feeling of being out-of-place that Sergeant Howie is experiencing, as did the constant refrain of
Corn Rigs throughout the film.
That's the mood I like in horror. I
really don't like gore and I'm not a fan of jump-scares, but the feeling of something being
off, of there being a secret that everyone else knows with terrible consequences, and of slowly-approaching, inescapable doom--those are my favorite kind of horror, and
The Wicker Man has all of them.
There's an Apple Fest in Lincoln Square this weekend and I'm probably going to go, but it seems a bit more ominous now than I did last week.
The second film was
Wattmarck, a short movie about an employee of a German synthesizer company who is obsessed with finding a tone that can affect the mind the same way other music affects the senses. Nothing seems to work and the company's fortunes decline as her quest becomes all-consuming until one day she finds the long-thought-lost
music of Erich Zann and gets the band back together for one final concert. This was also all about mood and dread--I kept expecting the band members and small audience to go insane, like in
Event Horizon, but it's not actually clear what effects the concert has. There's an
online narrative experiencing coming next Thursday, though, so perhaps the story continues.
I was exhausted yesterday, but last night I went to bed an hour early and got a good night's sleep so I'm in a much better mood today. I'm going to take that lesson forward and try to go to bed early every night this week! ...except Friday, where I'm going to see another silent film,
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in a late-night showing. Otherwise, this week is quiet and I'm really looking forward to that.