Despite the dip into fall weather this week, with accompanying fog and grey skies and even the occasional splutter of rain, this weekend turned out to be absolutely lovely. I don’t expect to be able to open all the windows and turn on the fans and air out the house in November, but right now, that’s exactly what we are doing.

We had a whole list of little errands to run today, but luckily none that required us to be anywhere until about 10am. I was up by 7am anyway, unable to sleep any later, so I decided to make good use of the extra time and peeled and chopped a few pounds of apples to turn into apple butter. This is kind of an experiment, based on a recipe we tried a few weeks ago that didn’t turn out like what we were expecting, but instead turned into a delicious apple butter, so the hope is that I can somehow duplicate it, in a large enough quantity to pour into jars and seal away for next year.

Today was the first day of the new schedule at the church – they’ve added a third service in between the original two – and to kick it off, they’ve also started a little breakfast buffet that runs in between the first and last services. So we decided to take advantage of that and went over to church a little early, instead of doing our usual run to one of the local bakeries for breakfast. We ended up sitting and chatting with some friends, which was nice, and then joined the ending of the new service (the choir was encouraged to do so, since all the singing in this new service happens at the end) and discovered that another long-absent friend had returned. There was choir rehearsal and then church, although Richard and I snuck out right after the choir sang so we could get a head start on all the things we had planned to do today, which was good, because we had a lot to do, and in a short amount of time.

First up was a run to CostCo, to stock up on veggies and food for lunches and some great stocking stuffers and presents (because I am all about getting the holiday shopping done as early as we can get it out of the way). Next up, after unloading the car, was trip in to Davis. Richard needed to return a power cord to one of his writing buddies who’d left it at the cafe yesterday, and I needed to swing by the new yarn store to drop off the yarn swatch I did for them, and to pick up a pair of needles for my next lace project. And then we met back up at Borders, taking advantage of all the lovely weather by just parking the car and walking all over town to do our errands instead of driving. Finally, fruit smoothies for lunch, followed by a trip to the grocery store to stock up on baking supplies, and then back home to unload and put everything away.

While Richard ran off to the drug store to pick up some prescription refills, I stayed home and whipped up a batch of pudding (which upgrades from ho hum to positively divine if you simply replace 1/4 cup of the milk with 4 ounces of cream cheese). Then I stirred together another batch of pumpkin bread and handed him the recipe for the low fat, no sugar added banana bread recipe that we found and he really likes, so that he could put it together instead of me, thus successfully avoiding my having to deal with, in any way whatsoever, any nasty overripe squashed banana goo.

So now the house smells delightfully of baking – luckily for me, the spices in the pumpkin bread far outweigh the banana (I am not a fan of banana, if that wasn’t obvious). The apple butter is still simmering away in the crockpot, adding an overlay of cinnamon to the whole mix. The air coming in from inside still holds a faint scent of the rain from the other night, and the cats are not the only ones walking through the house, pausing by the open windows, taking in the smells and the sounds of this very late, and oh so lovely autumn night.

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Do you know what is better than having one friend with a yarn store? Or better than having *two* friends with a yarn store? Having those two friends decide to form a partnership and open a store that allows them both to coordinate not only what they can buy, but what they can provide to all of us very lucky knitters. And that is exactly what is going on right now in Davis these days. There are a lot of us eagerly looking forward to the official grand opening of the new yarn store, which is scheduled for the 15th, and what better way to ensure that it will open in top condition and on time than to go over and lend a hand in whatever they might need at the moment.

I haven’t had a lot of time this past week to head over to help, but today the game we’d originally scheduled ended up being cancelled, so I decided to see if they could use me, and headed off to Davis, leaving Richard to go join a group of fellow Nanowrimo participants for a writing session, and the cats to lounge around at home, sleeping and stretching and otherwise generally fending for themselves.

I had a wonderful time at the store, labeling things and typing up inventories, and making a few swatches (I even came home with another ball to swatch in my purse). It was especially wonderful to see how much they’ve already set up, and imagine how it will look once it opens.

Richard came over to see the store-in-progress as well, and then the two of us decided that as long as we were in Davis, we might as well have sushi for dinner. And then we came home to curl up in the living room, surrounded by purring cats, to watch a very cheesey film from long ago – Gremlins II. We actually watched the first one last night and it is kind of embarrassing to realize that I had not remembered just how very bad it was. I never saw the second one when it came out in theaters, but Richard had, and it was just as bad, although this time it was bad on purpose (the second is very much a spoof).

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It’s November now, and yesterday it even rained, and there are fall colors and pumpkins and wintery things everywhere I look. This, of course, means that my mind turns toward baking, because winter and baking go hand in hand. Since I had the day off from work today I decided to get a head start on some of that baking. The church bazaar is coming up in two weeks, and I usually try to get a half dozen or so loaves of bread squirreled away in the freezer so that I’m ready to donate a box of goodies for the baked good sale that always does so well.

This morning I made the first batch of pumpkin bread for the season. I would have made more, since I was certainly in the baking mood, but I ran out of eggs and oil after the first batch, and while I was in the mood for baking today, I was also feeling a bit lazy. Days off with nothing much that has to be done tend to do that to me. So instead of making more bread, I let the two loaves cool down and packed one carefully away into the freezer, and then cut into the other one, because it is always important to test your baked goods just to make sure that they came out okay. And it did. Oh my, it did.

Pumpkin bread is one of those things that I refuse to modify for the sake of health or diet or any other reason. The recipe I use is the same one my mom has made for as long as we can remember, and it involves three cups of sugar and an entire cup of oil and four eggs. The only remotely healthy modification I have ever made is to use egg substitute instead of real eggs, but that has never been done in any futile attempt at lightening the bread, but is instead a result of the fact that those are usually the only eggs we ever have in the house and I cannot be bothered to go invest in a carton of real eggs just for this.

I also decided that I should get to work on trying to reset the pomegranate jelly which we tried (and failed, apparently) to make a few weeks ago. For whatever reason, pomegranate jelly is one of the mecurial of jellies to make, in that you can follow the recipe exactly the same, and one batch will set while the other refuses to gel and instead has to be labeled as pomegranate syrup. This year, of the three batches we made, only the first one set. This year, however, we decided that there was enough time to try a few experiments and see if there was any way it could be salvaged (ah, the knowledge one can find when armed with a high speed connection and Google). So I carefully measured out pectin and stirred it and boiled it and created a little highly concentrated pectin soup, and then even more carefully stirred together one cup of unset jelly and a little sugar and just the right amount of pectin and boiled it for exactly two minutes, no more and no less, and sterilized the jar and boiled the lid and poured in the jelly and put it all together and wonder of wonders, it looks like this just might have worked. So now the next step is to do this to all the rest of the jelly (about a dozen jars) and see how many more of them I can salvage, and then next year try to figure out what the magic formula is so I can avoid having to jump through all these extra hoops next time around.

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My dad sent out an email yesterday that he had attended his very last physical therapy session, and that the surgeon who did the operation on his neck says it looks like it’s healing fine. And with that, the whole saga has ended. I am still wrestling with the fact that this whole thing started less than two months ago, and yet, aside from the slowly disappearing scar on his neck, you would not guess to look at him what we all have gone through. Before we all know it, he will be back to work, flying off on another assignment. Come this time next year it is going to feel as if it was a million years ago. At least that’s what I’m hoping.

We have taken a new tactic in dealing with Checkers. Normally, for a skitterish cat like her, I would go slowly, and let her come out to us, but we’ve learned that this doesn’t work. I started dragging her out of her little cave in the computer room (she’s living in a corner shelf, by choice, and seems quite happy there) and putting her on my lap for pets and attention, and that seemed to make her more willing to come out when she saw me enter the room. But she’d still shy away from Richard, so I recommended he start doing the same thing. And what an amazing difference. Now that she’s not dashing away from us when we walk in the room, she is spending more and more time out of her cave, bouncing around on the cat tree (where she has decided that the second shelf is the place where we are to come and give her attention immediately, or else she will holler at us repeatedly until we do). And even better yet, as she’s gotten more comfortable, she’s been standing up to the few remaining ‘bullies’. Sebastian still comes in and growls at her, but she ignores him completely, and he’s starting to give it up. And Zucchini will come in and stare intently at her, but now that she is mostly ignoring him, he is far less likely to try to chase her. The situation between her and Rosie still remains tense, but even that seems to have been reduced to an uneasy truce. Maybe in a year or so they can be in the same room with each other without one or both of them growling, and I will feel as if all this angst and drama was a million years ago. At least that’s what I’m hoping.

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Today is the first day of November, and it is ushered in, somehow most appropriately, by a grey sky and misty rain that was just enough to smear all the dust and grime on my windshield into a vision-obscuring mess, but not enough to wash the gunk away. I have parked my car completely in the open this morning, however, in the hopes that if the sprinkles continue long enough, maybe by the time I head home, it will have been enough to clear the window so I can see.

Today is also the first day of NaBloPoMo, which is the bloggers’ answer to Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month). In the spirit of an early Holidailies, or rather, to kick start my rather rusty posting habits, I’ve committed to posting every day of this month. That means that if I can keep this up, all of you (my three remaining trusty readers) can count on brand new content every day for two months straight. Notice that I did not promise that it would be scintillating content; just that it would be new. Which is certainly an improvement on the rest of this year.

Anyway. Last night was Halloween and we did our usual very exciting Halloween thing (which isn’t very exciting, but then Halloween never is when you no longer can go ringing doorbells asking for candy). We made meatballs and spaghetti for dinner, a novel thing since I cannot remember the last time we had actual ground beef in the house (usually it would be ground turkey, or the faux ground beef). We passed out gummy body parts for candy – something which apparently made a hit, since a number of little kids thought it was pretty cool to get gummy eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and severed fingers in their candy bag. This year we watched The Fog, a movie with an interesting concept – crew of plague ship comes back from the ocean for revenge on the ancestors of the men who burned them all alive – but a predictable outcome. The good thing is that we weren’t looking for anything highly intellectual – lame horror flicks are far better for watching when you have to hit the pause button every few minutes.

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The cat (who isn’t sick anymore. I hope) Here is the story of the sick cat. At some point on Saturday, Tangerine got outside. We do not know when; all we know is that we didn’t even notice it until Sunday (for an extra heaping of bad cat parent guilt!) and then we could not find her anywhere at all, and we only found her after Richard put up posters on Monday morning and a neighbor called to say she’d been found. We can only assume that the whole thing was a huge trauma for her because when she came back she was nervous and lethargic and by the time we took her to the vet on Tuesday she was dehydrated and not eating, and basically we ended up force feeding her baby food and giving her fluids until Thursday afternoon when she finally decided that eating might be a good idea. Since then she has been doing her best to make up for lost time by sucking down food at every opportunity, and enjoying all the extra attention her very relieved humans have been giving her.

Jelly Two friends and I got together this morning and we made three batches of pomegranate jelly and 5 batches of jalepeno pepper jelly. The pomegranate jelly is very time consuming and also very tempermental and I have only ever had about a 50% rate of success in my years of making it for getting it to set into jelly and not just remain pomegranate syrup. The jalepeno pepper jelly is disgustingly easy and quick and very, very pretty, and the best part is that even if it does not set much, it doesn’t matter. We use the recipe from the Chevy’s Fresh Mex cookbook, and it is amazing.

For the pomegranate jelly, I shucked a bit more than half the pomegrantes from our tree to get enough seeds for one batch. My skin is so dry that it just sucks up any bit of dye, and the nifty thing about pomegranates is that while the seeds stain everything purple, the skin can stain everything an amazingly sickly yellow with just the faintest hint of green. If I had timed this better I could have simply said that the horrid coloration on my fingers was just part of some strange Halloween costume.

The niece Have I mentioned lately how much fun my niece is for the rest of us to watch (maybe not so much fun to her parents, from time to time)? The latest story, as related by my mom, is that my niece, who is six and a half, got so annoyed at the fact that her mom yelled at her (the fact that she deserved the yelling is, of course, irrelevant in the mind of a determined six year old) that she stormed off to her room and wrote her mom a letter, telling her that if she didn’t promise to never yell at her again, she was going to run away. I admit to wondering just how hard it was for my little sister to not burst into hysterical laughter and instead keep her calm about it. But anyway, the delicious irony of this is that it’s my little sister who was the one who tended to do exactly the same thing when she was young too.

The mind is a funny thing at 3 in the morning, when you are lying in bed trying, and failing, to fall back asleep. No matter how sleep deprived you might be, it will still insist on whirling around in a million different directions at the time when you want more than anything for it to shut the hell up already and let you go back to sleep. And I feel like, lately, the whole waking up at 3am and lying in bed with too many thoughts is becoming more than norm than the exception these days. Really, I need my life to become dull for a little while. No more worries about family members having risky sugrical procedures. No more worrying about cats who were lost outside in the cold for two nights and came home sick. No more obsessing about things I cannot control – the current administration’s latest idiotic and potentially disasterous decisions, the fate of our country in the grand scheme of the world, global warming, and on and on. Enough of all of these. I need sleep. I am tired of being tired.

It hasn’t been all bad, these past few weeks. My dad’s latest surgery went very well, since this time it was only the carotid artery they were cutting open instead of his ribcage. We flew up to Washington and spent a wonderful weekend visiting my little sister and my brother-in-law and the world’s cutest little six-year-old niece, decorating a Halloween gingerbread house, playing ‘soccer’ with a balloon ball, getting to feed alpaca, teaching my little sister and my niece to knit. There is a new yarn store opening soon in Davis, and from what I know of the soon-to-be owner, it’s going to be awesome. My very first knitting pattern I have ever submitted has been accepted for publication in a webzine (in December, yes I’ll post links). The pomegranate tree has produced a massive pile of pomegranates, some of which will be turned into jelly this coming weekend. We got to see Terry Pratchett in Petaluma this past weekend. I discovered how much fun it could be to commute to San Francisco and back by train. All good things, happy things, things that should let me rest easy and sleep through the night.

But the mind is a funny thing. And mine just isn’t ready to let go of all the things that are not so good and not so happy, and I do not know how to make it just stop spinning and leave me alone instead of waking me up at 3am and making me lie there instead, unable to do more than rest one hand on the back of our very sick cat and reassure myself over and over that she is still breathing and that she will be okay and the world will be a brighter place if only I could just figure out how to let go.

Today while at church I asked someone who has far more extensive experience about yards and trees and such than I, for advice on what to do with our tree. He noted that trees are actually far more resilient than we often give them credit for, and that it would likely be okay as long as we could drag it back upright and stake it firmly in place. So this afternoon Richard and I went to Lowe’s and tracked down a tree staking kit as well as a pair of tree clippers, and when we got home we hacked off large portions of the tree while it was still on its side and then dragged it back upright and managed to stake it into place. Apparently we are lucky in that it is prime tree pruning time right now anyway, so removing a big chunk of the weight makes it less top heavy and (we hope) less likely to go careening back down again in the (inevitable) next wind storm. I also took this opportunity to hack off a few of the small lower branches of the white peach tree, because it has a pesky tendency to grow branches that actually point down instead of up, and thus make the tree look more like a shrub and less like a tree. Although I should not speak too unkindly of the white peach tree because at least it is recognizably a tree. The pomegranate tree is the most un-treelike tree in our yard because it is just this wild shrubby thing with branches everywhere. I do not know if it ever will resemble a tree at all, but as long as it continues to produce pomegrantes as large and numerous as it currently is doing, it can pretend to be a low-running vine for all I care.

It was Joyful Noise Sunday this morning, which means it was busy. I picked up my dad for recorder group practice (since he’s not going to be allowed to drive again for a while) and there were only four of us but I think we sounded pretty good for our size. Choir is also smaller this year than in years previous – not sure if this is just because people are out of town, or if I am not the only one who is starting to really feel like I just need a break. The minister pulled my dad aside after the recorder group played and talked about how quickly and wonderfully he has recovered and everyone gave him a standing ovation, which was unexpected and a bit overwhelming.

There is a new Borders in Vacaville, which opened only a few weeks ago in the new shopping center along the freeway (and as an aside, it is a bit ironic and also extremely annoying that Vacaville can continue to get large retail establishments and lovely shopping areas, while my town has only managed to attract, of all horrible things to attract, a race track), so one of the regular knitting group members suggested we all meet there and check it out. I suggested to Richard that he could go with me because I knew it would be such a hardship for him to have to go hang out in a large, new bookstore for a few hours (not) so he brought along his laptop and we had a healthy lunch of coffee drinks and pastries and I sat with my knitting friends and he sat all by himself at another table and we both had a lovely few hours of doing things we like.

The good news is that I did manage to get my self-designed knitting item completely finished and bound off – twice, in fact (I bound it off last night but then ripped out the ends and tacked on another foot of length Saturday morning), which means that the total time it took to knit falls quite comfortably in the requirements for projects that Knitty is looking for. Not, mind you, that this is any guarentee in the remotest possibility that they will actually decide to publish my design, since I suspect that they likely get swamped with designs from hundreds of other hopeful knitters come submission deadline week, but I am currently doing my best to maintain my optimism, and at the very least, this made me actually *do* the darn thing, if nothing else.

The bad news is that by the time we woke up on thi morning, the apple tree was back down on its side again, and this time I saw what looks like possible fresh splitting near the base. Ugh. Although the wind couldn’t have been all that strong last night since our makeshift stake and prop method for the tangelo tree (slighly warped pole from bird feeder plus large plastic bag) seems to be holding just fine.

Richard’s parents and his little sister came up for the Scottish Games this afternoon, and I convinced his sister to play scarf model for me (mainly so I don’t have to do it myself) and dragged her outside into 90 degree weather and wrapped her in a coat and scarf and told her to look cold. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find somewhere to pose a knitted winter item outside where it might actually look wintery, when it is 90 degrees outside and the trees are all still leafy and green?

The Scottish Games this year were kind of tired and small. We’d heard rumors that the person in charge of organizing the music kind of dropped the ball, but it looks like they weren’t the only one who flubbed up. There were only about half as many booths from clans there, and only about half as many vendors, and even the band we ended up listening to had only about half the amount of energy (or even talent) as what we’re accustomed to seeing. I hope this is just a fluke and that next year’s Games are back to their former strength, but it was a bit disappointing.

We met up with my parents for dinner at an Italian place in Davis, since they had a play this later evening and that way they were closer to where they needed to be. Richard and I did not renew our season tickets for the musical theater this year, mainly because we both needed a break, but also because this season they are scheduled to do Oliver again, and I am quite frankly still traumatized by the last time they did Oliver (the main character attempted to make up for the fact that he could not sing by increasing his volume and thus, his painful off-key-ness. It was…well, I still cannot speak of it without cringing). My mom and dad are slowly starting to eat out again, so that they can work out how to find ways for my dad to meet his dietary restrictions when he goes back on the road for work. Dinner was fun and noisy and involved a lot of laughing which is usually the case when our families get together, and it was nice to see my dad looking much more like his normal self.

The good news is that I did manage to get my self-designed knitting item completely finished and bound off – twice, in fact (I bound it off last night but then ripped out the ends and tacked on another foot of length Saturday morning), which means that the total time it took to knit falls quite comfortably in the requirements for projects that Knitty is looking for. Not, mind you, that this is any guarentee in the remotest possibility that they will actually decide to publish my design, since I suspect that they likely get swamped with designs from hundreds of other hopeful knitters come submission deadline week, but I am currently doing my best to maintain my optimism, and at the very least, this made me actually *do* the darn thing, if nothing else.

The bad news is that by the time we woke up on thi morning, the apple tree was back down on its side again, and this time I saw what looks like possible fresh splitting near the base. Ugh. Although the wind couldn’t have been all that strong last night since our makeshift stake and prop method for the tangelo tree (slighly warped pole from bird feeder plus large plastic bag) seems to be holding just fine.

Richard’s parents and his little sister came up for the Scottish Games this afternoon, and I convinced his sister to play scarf model for me (mainly so I don’t have to do it myself) and dragged her outside into 90 degree weather and wrapped her in a coat and scarf and told her to look cold. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find somewhere to pose a knitted winter item outside where it might actually look wintery, when it is 90 degrees outside and the trees are all still leafy and green?

The Scottish Games this year were kind of tired and small. We’d heard rumors that the person in charge of organizing the music kind of dropped the ball, but it looks like they weren’t the only one who flubbed up. There were only about half as many booths from clans there, and only about half as many vendors, and even the band we ended up listening to had only about half the amount of energy (or even talent) as what we’re accustomed to seeing. I hope this is just a fluke and that next year’s Games are back to their former strength, but it was a bit disappointing.

We met up with my parents for dinner at an Italian place in Davis, since they had a play this later evening and that way they were closer to where they needed to be. Richard and I did not renew our season tickets for the musical theater this year, mainly because we both needed a break, but also because this season they are scheduled to do Oliver again, and I am quite frankly still traumatized by the last time they did Oliver (the main character attempted to make up for the fact that he could not sing by increasing his volume and thus, his painful off-key-ness. It was…well, I still cannot speak of it without cringing). My mom and dad are slowly starting to eat out again, so that they can work out how to find ways for my dad to meet his dietary restrictions when he goes back on the road for work. Dinner was fun and noisy and involved a lot of laughing which is usually the case when our families get together, and it was nice to see my dad looking much more like his normal self.