We were supposed to go to Apple Hill today. We sat down and looked at the calendar and figured out a free weekend and also factored in the knowledge that going up there before Halloween would mean crowds and heat and not so much fun, and this weekend seemed to be the best one. However, that only lasted until this past Wednesday night, when the representative from the Board of Trustees announced during the Admin Council meeting that they would be stripping and refinishing the linoleum floors today, and that Richard was in charge of coordinating that. Um. Oh really?

So…no going to Apple Hill today. Instead Richard got up early and joined some of the other men of the church for breakfast at our local greasy spoon (where they leave the toaster on the table for you and they tell you what you really should be ordering, just in case you thought you might want something they don't agree with). And then after breakfast he headed off to the church and along with a small crowd of other guys, spent about six hours working on the floors.

I, meanwhile, decided that I might as well take advantage of all this free time I suddenly had. So I went to the grocery store and loaded up on baking supplies and came home and spent many hours baking pumpkin bread for the church bazaar in a few weeks. In between stirring and pouring, while the bread was baking, I sat upstairs in one of the glider rockers in our master bedroom's bay window, and turned on the fireplace to warm up the room, and worked on the cardigan I am knitting for myself in a colorway called, amusingly enough, Pumpkin.

Pumpkin bread is a required food this time of year. It is dense and it is rich and there is nothing the remotest bit diet friendly about it, save for the fact that there's about half a pound of pumpkin in every loaf. The whole house smelled divine the entire afternoon. I didn't pay much attention at first, but when I ran out to get something later in the day and came back, the smell hit me the instant I opened the door. I kept telling myself that this was for a fund raiser, and somehow managed to wrap up all the loaves and stash them in the freezer without taking a single taste. There will be plenty of time for pumpkin bread later this month, once Thanksgiving rolls around the great day of overeating is upon us.

When Richard got home, I called around and found a place that could rent us a truck, and we headed off to Vacaville to pick up some shelves. I've mentioned before that we are gradually turning our spare room into a library. Someone on the Freecyclers list posted last week that he had a huge set of bookshelves to get rid of and I jumped at the chance. So after much emailing back and forth we settled on this afternoon for pick up. They are huge and heavy and far sturdier than anything we currently own. These are not kit bookshelves – these look like shelves that were built for an actual library at one point.

The pieces are all currently sitting on our front porch, where we put them for lack of somewhere else, in order to clear out the rental truck so we could get it turned in before they closed. We'll move them upstairs into the library probably tomorrow afternoon and at some point in the next week or two we'll put them together. They're not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. They are old and they are beat up, and they're not exactly the style we're hoping for in our long-term vision of the room. But they are free and they are big, and for now – at least until we can track down a good carpenter and the funds to have what we really want custom built, they will do just fine.