We did more yesterday than carve pumpkins, by the way. We went to the hardware store because the garbage disposal Richard installed a few months ago had suddenly sprung a slow and insidious leak, which required we get a new, slightly longer, section of piping. While we were there, we also picked up two little sample packets of wood stain, because a while back my dad built me a tall, narrow bookcase to stand beside the piano so I have somewhere to put all the music instead of on top of the piano, where it has the unfortunate tendency to slide onto the floor, taking any bookends with it. The shelves are built; all I have needed to do is to stain it, and now that the weather is nice enough that being stuck out in the garage with chunks of wood and some stain is not as uncomfortable an idea as it was back when it was still over 90 degrees in the shade. So now we have two tiny little packets of stain to try out, to see which one we prefer, and perhaps before the year ends I'll have made my decision on the color and gotten around to doing the actually work. Ha. We shall see.

We also picked up a new laptop bag for me, since my laptop does not fit in the old bag and I'm headed off for another business trip - this one three days - I really need something in which to carry it that doesn't involve borrowing Richard's. And we successfully avoided buying any new computer games, although I admit I did check to see if they have the latest incarnation of Civilization, since the pre-release of Civ IV is out. Not, mind you, that I really *need* this game, because I have aleady spent the past few weeks in full on Civ mode, and I really ought to be doing something more productive in the evenings than camping out at my computer, but the lure of the game, it is strong.

Anyway. I woke up this morning with a sore throat, and it has slowly gotten worse over the course of the day. I took some cold medicine this morning in order to make it through church (and choir) without coughing or sneezing, but it was apparently *not* a non-drowsy formulation, because I spent a majority of the morning and most of the afternoon feeling as if, while my brain was perfectly fine, my body was off it its own little world. I also decided that maybe driving while feeling that way was not necessarily the best thing to do. I am crossing my fingers that this is just a little 24 hour sort of thing, because I have a very busy week coming up and I really do not have time to be sick. Ugh.

Richard's extended department does a Halloween potluck every year, so this year we're sending him with cat poop cookies, going on how well the litter box cake went over last year. So this evening, after dinner, the two of us rolled chocolate dough into little logs and rolled them in Grapenuts and baked up a double batch of disturbingly realistic looking little logs. We'll see tomorrow how it goes.