Fort Mott

A couple of weeks ago I went to Fort Mott State Park with a cousin of mine.  I had never heard of it, but my cousin had been there before and suggested we go.  My cousin is awesome, by the way.  I don't just love her because she is family; I love hanging out with her, too.  This is the same cousin whose horse shows I've attended and with whom I went to New Bolton when her horse was having problems.  We go to the barn together fairly often, but this was the first non-horse related thing we've done together for a long time.

This is my cousin's horse. He's a cutie.

A cafe near Fort Mott allows members of a local photo club to hang photos there for sale.  My cousin belongs to the club, so we stopped at the cafe, The Graystone Cafe, on the way to the fort so that she could drop off a couple of framed prints.  We also picked up some food there and brought it to the park to eat before walking around.  I had a Caprese panini- tomato, mozzarella, basil, balsamic vinaigrette.  It's pretty much my ideal sandwich, and this one was delicious.

Time to walk around Fort Mott.  It's right on the Delaware River, south enough in New Jersey so that when looking across the river, it's Delaware and not Pennsylvania that's across the way.  We walked a path along the river and the sea wall.

An old watchtower presented itself as a subject for our cameras.

I liked the broken stairway and the keep off sign.

It was a little eerie.

It was kind of cool.

It was getting dark at this point, so the mosquitoes were in full-on attack mode.  Time to leave!  I had a lot of fun.  Fort Mott is a neat little place.

Blueberry pie disaster

I made my first pie this week.  Notice that the title of this post is blueberry pie disaster.  That about sums it up!

This sure doesn't look like a pie.

I made the crust from scratch.  I made the filling from scratch.  It came out looking like a mutant pie that no one should eat.  It didn't taste any better than it looked.  I used a recipe from Martha Stewart.  I'm not sure what was wrong.  I kept the crust ingredients cold.  I could see the little dots of butter in there when I rolled it out.  The filling smelled delicious when I mixed it all together.  It had to stay in the oven for a long time because it wasn't browning, and yet I had the oven at a high temperature at first and then turned it down to bake the rest of the way.  Usually I can figure out what went wrong with a recipe or what I didn't like about the finished product, but with this one, I'm stumped.  It went wrong and tasted bad, and I don't know why.

mutant pie

The blueberry filling ended up bursting out all over the pie, even though I vented the top.  This pie looked very pretty and had fluted edges when it went into the oven.  It came out looking terrible.  Hopefully, the next pie I bake will be better.  This is not my last pie.

Doctor Who: The Mind Robber

"The Mind Robber" is a story from the tenure of the wonderfully fantastic 2nd Doctor.  His companions in the story are Jamie and Zoe.

Zoe, Jamie, and the Doctor in the TARDIS

Jamie and Zoe are two of my all-time favorite Doctor Who companions.  Jamie is a Scottish Highlander from the past, while Zoe is a genius from the future.  Jamie is lovable and funny and somewhat excitable.  He went from fighting the Redcoats to travelling with the Doctor.  Zoe is brilliant, with an intellect that rivals the Doctor's at times.  She also kicks butt.  In this episode, she gets into a fight and uses Judo to beat a man twice her size.  She was downright Emma Peel-like.  

This story is sort of an oddball for Doctor Who.  It branches out into fantasy rather than the traditional sci-fi of the show.  It starts off immediately after the preceding serial, "The Dominators," ends.  The TARDIS is buried in lava, and they move the TARDIS outside of space and time to get out.  Does that make sense?  Not really.  But, they had to have a reason to get the TARDIS outside of space and time, so there it is.  The thing about this story is that it was originally supposed to be four parts instead of five.  The story before it was going to be five parts instead of four.  That was changed at the last minute, so the first part is kind of filler.  Also, they had no budget for it, so it took place entirely in the TARDIS control room and a strange, white, outside of time and space netherworld.  This was so they wouldn't have to spend money on sets.

The second part gets to the meat of the story.  The three travellers have arrived in a very strange place.  It's a land of fiction.  Jamie climbs what they think is a tree.  When he gets to the top, he looks down and sees that the trees are instead words in a book.  They run into Gulliver from Gulliver's Travels, the Minataur, a unicorn, Rapunzel, and Medusa, among others.  I really like what they did with Gulliver in the story.  He only speaks in lines from his book.  The Doctor says that because Gulliver is fictional, he can only speak the lines that were given to him.  It's very clever.  

Gulliver

The actor who played Gulliver, Bernard Horsfall, has an interesting history with Doctor Who.  This was his first appearance on the show, but he would be on three more times.  The next time was in another 2nd Doctor episode, "The War Games," in which he played a Time Lord.  This was the first time any Time Lords other than the Doctor were seen in the show.  His third role was in a 3rd Doctor episode, "Planet of the Daleks."  His final appearance was as another Time Lord in the 4th Doctor story "The Deadly Assassin."  Horsfall played four excellent parts in four strong episodes of Doctor Who.  (Okay, many Whovians think "Planet of the Daleks" isn't that great, but I like it.)  

Something very characteristic of the 2nd Doctor is demonstrated in the above screenshot.  He is always doing something with his hands.  It can be seen in the screenshot below, too.  The 2nd Doctor can be a bit fidgety.  He can also come across as not having a handle on the situation, but many of the Doctors are like that.  There is a scene in which Jamie is frozen still and his face becomes a blank slate.  The Doctor has to choose from different sets of eyes, noses, and mouths to get Jamie's face back.  He chooses wrong (he chose...poorly), so a different actor plays Jamie for a little while!

I haven't said much about the plot of this episode.  I don't want to say there isn't much of a plot, but there really isn't.  They need to get back to regular time, the Doctor wants to find out what's driving this land of fiction, and that's pretty much it.  The fun of this episode is the interaction with the fictional characters.  

I like "The Mind Robber."  It's unusual.  I'm an avid reader, so the idea of fictional characters coming to life is intriguing to me.  I'd like to meet some fictional characters myself.