the extent of my exposure to french is when i lived with three french guys for like 6 months and every day they tried to get me to figure out how to say my r’s in my throat instead of my nose and i never could and me just trying to say “syrup” in french was top comedy for them
oh and also the french name for freckles literally translates into like “spots of the red” or “stains of the red hair” or w/e which i found really cute and charming
oh and ALSO there we enough of us that we went through a box of wine every night at dinner with one glass each and when it emptied one of them would take the bag out and inflate it and bop it around the dinner table like a beach ball.
God i wish someone would sell me a haunted house. Ghosts aren’t real and I’d love to get a really nice house for like half the price that it should be.
My friend got married yesterday and we missed the wedding because of work but we made it to the reception. Because its mid-September and the reception was in a nature center (awesome!) there was a little bit of a fall theme. Not overbearingly, but the tables all had these tiny pumpkins.
So they’re cleaning up at the end of it and we’re still hanging out because we haven’t seen these people in forever and we can talk until three in the morning when we get together. All of a sudden, the Maid of Honor hands us a tiny pumpkin.
“Take one.”
“Um… okay?”
“Take another.”
“….?”
“It is my duty as Maid of Honor to make sure that the guests leave with an uncomfortable number of tiny pumpkins.”
So it turns out that she’d gotten a bunch of them for a Halloween party last year and after the party was over her mom threw them into the compost heap thinking that would be the end of it. But what she didn’t seem to realize was that if you put pumpkins in a compost heap- it grows more pumpkins. It grows pumpkins exponentially. Serious mathematical anomaly pumpkins.
So this year she has even more tiny pumpkins and she figured it would be a good idea to have them as decor for the reception. BUT- she would still have to throw them out at the end of the day and no matter where you throw them you are doomed to have a ridiculous amount of tiny pumpkins growing SOMEWHERE at your fault.
So everyone left with at least two tiny pumpkins and that’s how we made friends with the Maid of Honor.
So I forgot about it and then the next morning I woke up and found these two tiny pumpkins in my purse and had a puzzling moment of ‘what?’
We were invited to the Maid of Honor’s house the other day so we could:
take some of the flowers off her hands
help with some post-wedding stuff
watch the presidential debate
play Clue for like three hours
drink a lot of booze.
And there are just… tiny pumpkins EVERYWHERE.
They were in the bathroom.
At the end of the night, I counted 26 tiny pumpkins, and that was just what I could see.
It happened again.
Three pumpkins ended up in my purse this time.
One of them has a face.
I need to stop drinking with this woman.
this is getting out of hand.
Okay so I finally had a day off and decided that the best way to handle the pumpkin situation was to eat them and muffins sounded fucking fantastic. But I found out really fast that most recipes call for a ‘can’ of pureed pumpkin and I don’t have a scale to go by. So I figured that I had six pumpkins, it would probably amount to something like one can, right?
Well… no.
It ended up being something like two and a half cans-ish. And that’s a really rough estimate. Turns out there’s a lot more meat on those things than you think there’d be. So I figured I could do something like double it and then make a half batch.
But then I ran out of sugar. I mis-measured the baking soda. I only had whole cloves, so I had to grind them down and had to estimate how much I needed. I couldn’t find the liquid measure.
I’m mixing up this giant bowl of pumpkin batter goo thinking shit shit shit this is going to be a mess. There’s no way anyone is going to be able to eat these things. And there’s no muffin cups. But I already made it this far and I’m stubborn as hell so in the oven they go.
I… kind of… forgot about them? Woops!
Place starts smelling like Yankee Candle and I’m like SHIT. Get over to the oven and…
they’re…
….somehow perfect?
Maybe a little dry, but they’re fucking delicious. Fucking magic pumpkins. Truly I am a witch.
So the moral of the story is that if life gives you tiny pumpkins, make them into muffins and give them right back.
Also roast the seeds because hell yeah.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
We’ve found her in real life guys
An actul fictional character in real life
she even baked with them
This is not the only evidence posed to me that I might, in fact, be a fictional character.
old tubed televisions like these work through electrons, wherein numerous electrons are stored inside a tube and multiple electron magnets manipulate them in order to create an image. these electrons can also be manipulated by powerful outside magnets, creating these effects.
Just as gravity is one key to how things move on Earth, a process called magnetic reconnection is key to how electrically-charged particles speed through space. Now, our Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, or MMS, has discovered magnetic reconnection – a process by which magnetic field lines explosively reconfigure – occurring in a new and surprising way near Earth.
Invisible to the eye, a vast network of magnetic energy and particles surround our planet — a dynamic system that influences our satellites and technology. The more we understand the way those particles move, the more we can protect our spacecraft and astronauts both near Earth and as we explore deeper into the solar system.
Earth’s magnetic field creates a protective bubble that shields us from highly energetic particles that stream in both from the Sun and interstellar space. As this solar wind bathes our planet, Earth’s magnetic field lines get stretched. Like elastic bands, they eventually release energy by snapping and flinging particles in their path to supersonic speeds.
That burst of energy is generated by magnetic reconnection. It’s pervasive throughout the universe — it happens on the Sun, in the space near Earth and even near black holes.
Scientists have observed this phenomenon many times in Earth’s vast magnetic environment, the magnetosphere. Now, a new study of data from our MMS mission caught the process occurring in a new and unexpected region of near-Earth space. For the first time, magnetic reconnection was seen in the magnetosheath — the boundary between our magnetosphere and the solar wind that flows throughout the solar system and one of the most turbulent regions in near-Earth space.
The four identical MMS spacecraft — flying through this region in a tight pyramid formation — saw the event in 3D. The arrows in the data visualization below show the hundreds of observations MMS took to measure the changes in particle motion and the magnetic field.
The data show that this event is unlike the magnetic reconnection we’ve observed before. If we think of these magnetic field lines as elastic bands, the ones in this region are much smaller and stretchier than elsewhere in near-Earth space — meaning that this process accelerates particles 40 times faster than typical magnetic reconnection near Earth. In short, MMS spotted a completely new magnetic process that is much faster than what we’ve seen before.
What’s more, this observation holds clues to what’s happening at smaller spatial scales, where turbulence takes over the process of mixing and accelerating particles. Turbulence in space moves in random ways and creates vortices, much like when you mix milk into coffee. The process by which turbulence energizes particles in space is still a big area of research, and linking this new discovery to turbulence research may give insights into how magnetic energy powers particle jets in space.