Sam Phillips was the composer for Gilmore Girls (she’s the voice of the “la la” filler that runs throughout the series). But Phillips says that she wasn’t the one who chose her song for a pivotal point in the series, that was creator Amy Sherman-Palidno’s choice.
But it’s a perfect choice for the scene in question and it comes back a few other times in the series. I probably would have liked this song anyway, had I encountered it outside the series, but it will probably always elicit an “awwww” because of the way it was used in the series.
Thanks to Laurie driving, Kelly and I journeyed out to Grand Lodge to see Hocus Pocus. You can see how very warm it was for early October.
For all of us, it was the first time we had seen this classic Halloween film. We concluded that we were just the wrong age when it was released (out of college, finishing college, starting college) and because we did not have small children in the 90s and early 2000s, we missed it being played ad nauseum when they were growing up.
While I thought the continued humor about the status of the main male lead’s virginity was odd, it was an amusing movie, made more so by a few children who were very excited to be frightened by the film, dramatically shrieking at the somewhat scary parts. Also, the moon was very pretty, though as usual looks nothing like it did in real life.
Afterward we wandered the halls of Grand Lodge while Kelly looked for the secret room and secret passage.
I purchased four tomato starts with the intention of trying out dry gardening. That means planting the tomatoes early and then giving them minimal water through the growing season. Reports I’ve read say that such tomatoes tend to have the best flavor.
I will say that this is a partial report on a not-fully-carried-out experiment. I didn’t get the tomatoes in the ground as early as I should have. They spent their first seven weeks in pots that I think doomed two of the plants to failure. It was a cold and wet spring and I just couldn’t motivate to get those plants in the ground. If they had spent five of their first seven weeks in the ground, I think they would have gotten off to a better start (two plants) or survived (two plants).
I only watered them once. I had blue 5-gallon buckets with holes in the bottom and intended to give them some water weekly, but that did not come to pass. Once it stopped being cold, it was a fairly warm summer—though we did not have days with 110+ degree heat like we did in 2021.
One thing I liked about the dry gardening the tomato plants didn’t put out any of the extraneous foliage they do when they are well watered. The plant sent out enough growth to support the making of tomatoes. It did not send out any more.
I got the most cherry tomatoes, but it was a fairly paltry number, cherry tomato-wise. Perhaps 20. And they were very staggered. I had two or three at a time, max. They did taste good though.
The Brandywines were the full-size tomatoes that survived. I tend to stay away from Brandywines as I think their growing season is too long for our summers. But we had a very long summer, so soon after I took this photo, I harvested the two tomatoes that grew. They were indeed delicious.
This little guy never got going. I think he was root bound. The other one died a few weeks after I planted it.
Overall, I think this might be a good method if you are growing your starts from seed and have a lot of land. Tomatoes that are dry gardened need to be spaced six feet apart. With a packet of cherry tomatoes and a packet of regular size tomatoes, you could easily end up with 10 starts of each for not very much of a cash investment. If you planted 20 tomato plants over a very large space, the yield would be much higher, and you wouldn’t have to pay for watering.
Also, when you don’t water, the weeding is much less complicated. That was a big plus.
If I’m up to gardening in the spring, I might repeat this experiment in 2023.
I was, sadly, not in the office that day, so I don’t know exactly the sound that comes when one makes a grave error when vapor sampling. But I enjoy that my colleagues were ready to learn.
