Snow on the Pumpkin

Some hungry squirrels attacked my neighbor's pumpkins.



Maybe they should have had a scarecrow to keep them away.



The Northampton Stop&Shop sells pre-painted pumpkins, but that feels like a form of creative laziness.



Happy Halloween, I guess.



The Pioneer Valley is known worldwide as one of America's most beautiful places. Unfortunately it comes with a few downsides, such as utterly corrupt politics and winters that come too early and springs that arrive too late. Here is the weather as I left UMass last night.



Of course it's nothing to the Old Chapel, which has seen the snowfalls of three centuries.



By morning the snow had stopped and this was how things looked by the babbling brook near my house.



Here's a little video I made while attempting to traverse the woodland way into downtown Northampton.



Finally I arrived downtown, where a bouquet of fallen branches surrounded a snow-faced Calvin Coolidge.



The buses were running as usual and so I soon arrived in Amherst, where the snowstorm perhaps caused this witch to crash into a UMass frathouse.



A menacing mouth greeted the customers of The Black Sheep, or would have if it was open.



A power outage meant that everything was closed, except of course for the store that never closes for any reason whatsoever.



No power meant the cash register didn't work, but if you could pay in cash with exact change it was business as usual.



In a world in which there is so little you can depend on, it is nice to know that on every single day since 1914 you can always count on Hastings.