Somehow or other, through actual planning or just good luck, we managed to get everything we needed for Thanksgiving *before* Thanksgiving. So no one had to do a frantic run to the store for something last minute. Naturally this means, I am sure, that the grocery stores were all open far later than they normally are, just to spite me, but it’s too late to care.

I’d invited my parents to come over for gingerbread pancakes, but they had both come down with the latest version of winter ick, so they stayed home to sniffle in private. I made the pancakes anyway, because we both love them, and also because the beauty of the combination of spices that make up gingerbread is that they get stronger when you let them sit, so they are even better the next day. Then we lolled lazily in front of the television and watched the Macy’s Christmas Parade, which was almost completely free of idiotic chatter until Al Roker showed up. Luckily he did not stick around for long, or else maybe enough people have called the network to ask them to please put a big cork in his mouth because he is not funny, no matter how much he thinks he is, and Thanksgiving is supposed to be about sharing and togetherness and being happy, and not about trying to mentally reach through a television screen and slap duct tape across someone’s mouth because every stupid thing that he says makes your head come that much closer to wanting to explode.

But anyway. Pancakes. Parade. Lazy slumping about the house in our pajamas and bathrobes until we couldn’t put it off any longer and had to go get showered and dressed if we were going to make it down to Richard’s parents’ house in time. And because I am always paranoid about there being horrid amounts of traffic (despite the fact that there never is) I wanted us to leave with an extra hour to spare, just to make sure we would get there in time.

I stirred up the green bean casserole, which is my contribution to Richard’s family dinner – and shockingly, something they had never had before I came along (I know, I’m not sure how they survived either) and we managed to time it so that it came out just as we were ready to head out. I carefully wrapped the casserole dish in towels and slid it into a canvas sack, all in an effort to keep it warm – effort which turned out to be rather pointless, as it went directly into the refrigerator the second we walked in the door anyway. Ah well. We swung by the little independent coffee shop on the way out of town to get blended mocha chillers, which fulfill both the chocolate and caffeine food groups amazingly well, and off we went. And what do you know, there *was* traffic on the way, at least through Fairfield where 680 and 80 and 12 all merge, so while we didn’t need that full extra hour, it did eat up nearly 30 minutes, which was just enough to make me glad that I allow myself to be paranoid about hitting traffic on Thanksgiving day.

I brought my knitting with me because despite thinking I was actually done making snowman, it turns out I am not, and I need to make five more before Christmas. By this time, however, I pretty much have the pattern memorized, and they go pretty quickly. Plus Richard was willing to drive, so I managed to get most of one snowman body done on the drive down, started the second one last night, and have only a few more rows on body number three to finish tonight.

Richard’s parents had invited several family friends over, some of whom have kids, so it was a lively crowd. We sat around and chatted and drank sodas and sparkling cider, and eventually realized that it was starting to get a little late and we were all starting to get a little hungry, and that’s when we all finally realized that the turkey – despite having been put in the oven set to the right temperature and with plenty of time to cook – was refusing to cooperate and was nowhere near done. They took it out briefly so we could warm up all the side dishes, but the turkey kept on stubbornly remaining uncooked. So when we finally sat down to dinner, it was without turkey, which, as one of the friends pointed out, meant that this Thanksgiving would get to be not just a nice gathering, but a memorable event. Plus, really, turkey is only a carrier for gravy, and for a lot of us (okay, me), we’d rather have the side dishes anyway. And there were certainly plenty of those to go around – stuffing and mashed potatoes, two kinds of cranberry sauce, a marvelous jello salad that reminded me very much of a green jello, pineapple, and nut concoction my mom sometimes makes, the green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, rolls, and on and on. And for dessert there was a box of chocolates because Richard’s niece recently started working at See’s, and two kinds of pie. I’m not sure we would have even had room to fit in a bite of turkey in there anyway!

Everyone stayed and talked and laughed until it was late and we were all starting to fall asleep on each other, but everyone was having too much fun to leave. But then suddenly they all did, and the house rang with silence and we all crawled off to bed, over stuffed from a wonderful day.

Today we did the traditional after-Thanksgiving things that Richard’s family does. We all met at a restaurant that is always over-full and crowded, but makes marvelous breakfasts, and we all stuffed ourselves silly with waffles and pancakes and eggs and bagels and coffee. And then we went to this florist that is a few miles down the road from the traditional breakfast spot, where each year every member of the family picks out one ornament from their rather expansive selection. I picked out a cute little glass snowman head wearing a swirly hat with tiny bells, because for some reason I have had snowmen on the brain lately (gee, I wonder why) and Richard picked out a penguin. Later in the afternoon, we all piled into the car and headed off to the movie theater to see the Wallace and Grommet movie, mainly because neither Richard nor I have ever seen Wallace and Grommet before, and Richard’s family decided that it was about time we did. The movie was delightful, and not just because there was a ravenous wererabbit, or because Grommet knits when he is nervous.

The turkey, by the way, was finally done at about 10:30 last night, so when we had the traditional leftovers-for-dinner this evening, we actually got to have turkey along side the leftovers, and despite taking nearly an entire day to finally decide it was willing to be cooked, it turned out delicious. There was more puttering and more talking and laughing, and more knitting, and then we realized that it was getting awfully late and we needed to head home. I drove, since it was too dark outside for me to knit, and we listened to the Barenaked Ladies Christmas album the entire trip and now here we are, and I am thinking that if I can manage to stay awake for even a little bit longer I can finish off those few remaining rows and have three completed snowman bodies, and be that much closer to being done with making cute knitted snowmen for another year.

When my mom sent me the info about this, I knew we needed to go. It was scheduled at the last minute, and noon on a Thursday afternoon is rather a hard time for most people to go anywhere, especially with very little notice. But considering the reason, I knew I had to be there, if only to add to the numbers of people willing to stand up for something they believe in.

I have been baking bread all week, so the house has smelled marvelously of pumpkin and cinnamon and ginger and allspice. I do this every year – fill up the freezer with loaves of pumpkin bread, and then thaw them out the night before, just in time for the church craft and bake sale. It’s been especially nice to have this, at least, to look forward to, since I no longer have any good reason to do the massive holiday cookie baking that I used to be able to do.
Along with the baking, I also decided to toss in a little knitting. I usually don’t bother contributing anything to the craft table, and unlike the past two years the young adults never got a chance to get together and cook up copious batches of pomegranate jelly, but this year, on a whim, I decided to whip up a few more snowmen, since the one I made last year turned out so cute. So I made these guys and what do you know, they sold. In fact, when there were only two left someone asked me if I could make one more, since she wanted three. It was rather a relief to know that they were cute enough that people were actually willing to buy them – so often with craft sales these days not much gets sold.

In years past the annual event has been a craft and bake sale that starts in the morning and stretches through the early afternoon, followed by a dinner in the evening. It’s been like this for as long as most people can remember, so it’s understandable that some people were getting a little burned out by the sheer amount of work. So this year we decided to do things a little different. We condensed the whole event into only three hours, tossed in a rather expansive brunch buffet (with pastries and ham and egg frittata, and even an oatmeal bar with all the toppings), created a ‘bake shop’ with all the pies, cakes and cookies displayed on pretty plates, so people could pick and choose what they wanted (and the baked goods were then boxed for transport), scheduled a few musical performances and set up a number of rather impressive displays around the church, in the form of an open house, so that newcomers could learn about the history (which, since our tiny little church building has been around over 100 years, is extensive) and the various programs that take place. So instead of just showing up in the morning to drop off my bread and browse the crafts before escaping for the rest of the day like I normally do, we actually ended up having to stay a lot longer. Richard was slated to be the information person for the bible study displays, while the recorder ensemble, for which I’m the de facto leader these days, was scheduled to play at 9:30 in the morning. And then there was really no point in me going home after that because the choir sang at 11:30, but we gathered to run through our songs at 10:45, and somewhere in there we had to fit in time to actually eat breakfast and browse the craft tables, and also snatch the very last jar of pomegranate jelly (because someone else *did* have the time to make it, yay!).

I would like to point out that the downside to watching “Into the Woods”, especially if it happens to be one of your favorite plays and you have most of the lyrics of the songs memorized, is that you will then be plagued for days (DAYS) afterwards with random snippets from songs in no particular order. And if it was the whole song running through your head maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, but it is not. It is just pieces that repeat themselves over and over and it is driving me insane. And yet I still hold an unnatural love for Stephen Sondheim’s music and lyrics, so apparently even two line musical ear worms is not enough to change my mind.

Anyway.

I was driving home from work last night and as I came up upon the causeway, I looked up toward the sky and saw something so amazing I literally gasped, all alone in my car. And then I did my very best to get into an accident by craning my neck side to side and trying to see out every window so I could watch what was going on up there, all the while, somehow managing to avoid plowing into anyone else on the road. Considering how erratic the traffic was on the causeway last night I strongly suspect I was not the only one awestruck by the whole thing, although the guy in the little silver blue sports car to my left probably was not even aware of it, because I rather belatedly realized that the dirty looks he was giving me were likely because he thought I was gaping at him. Um. No.

It looked as if nearly every single bird in all of the surrounding few counties decided that last night was the night to fly south for the winter (although admittedly it looked as if they were all heading north, so I’m not sure exactly what to make of that). What first caught my eye was a wide swath of black spots winging across the sky – and it just kept on coming. The expanse of birds crossed over the causeway and disappeared into the distance and when I looked to where they were coming from it seemed as if that also went on forever. It was beyond amazing. Why everyone did not immediately slam into each other from not watching the road I will never know. I wanted so badly to pull over and whip out my camera and try to capture the view of thousands of birds flying overhead in one dense ribbon of black, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to get a good picture, and besides, there really isn’t anywhere to pull over on the causeway, and with my luck, even if I *did* pull over, I would naturally be the one the police would notice, which would cause them to pull over and give me a ticket because I strongly suspect ‘taking pictures of all those birds, did you see them?’ would not be an acceptable excuse.

I think what struck me the most was not that there were so many, but that they were not flying in formation. Further along the highway, just as I was coming off the causeway I saw another swath of birds, but these were all in formation, and so their flight path was liberally decorated with uneven v’s. It was a little surreal to see them, especially since as I got nearer to where they were flying the air shimmered as if there was intense heat – a visual effect brought on by the fact that they were maintaining those formations perfectly, but the flapping of their wings caused the entire panorama to flicker. And again, those layers of v’s stretched on either side of the road as far as I could see into the twilight of the sky.

As I pulled off the highway on the exit to home I could see back down the road, and up into the sky where the moon hung amid clouds as if it lay at the end of a road of watery silver. And even though I could not see the birds anymore, I rolled down my window and just for a moment I thought perhaps I could hear them, calling into the night even though by then it was almost too dark to see if they were truly there.

We made our yearly trip up to Apple Hill today. The way things worked out, this was really the only weekend we’ve had so far where we had the entire day (or at least most of it) free.

I’d figured it would be a good time to come as well since we’d miss the Halloween crowds, but it would be too early yet for the Christmas rush, and that did turn out to be true. Unfortunately, we found out that most of the craft vendors stop coming after Halloween (I suspect the weather may be a factor), so many of the places we stopped were a bit more bare than usual.

We stopped at High Hill Ranch first, since that’s where they make the best caramel apples. We’d only picked up coffee on the drive up because we knew we’d be eating pie and things once there, so we had apple donuts for breakfast and left the caramel apples for later. It was a gorgeous day up there – not too hot and not too cold – which made it perfect for the next place on the list, Kids Inc (since they have the best pie). They’ve got a nature walk down a rather steep hill, that winds around just past an orchard of apples and a field of pumpkins, along a tiny creek and under a canopy of trees. We met a few people along the path, but they were all heading in the opposite direction so for the most part we had it all to ourselves. And by the time we had climbed back up that rather steep hill, we were definitely ready for heaping servings of ice cream and apple pie with steaming cider sauce.

We made a few more stop along the route. I found cinnamon apple jelly in one little craft store and bought my yearly jar. We passed by a brewery and Richard tried a few of their beers. We checked out an open house (because I like looking at open houses) that stood on three acres of trees up a hill and featured a lovely glassed in sun porch upstairs that seemed as if it had been built with cats specifically in mind. And then we headed back home, to work on novels (Richard) or knitting (me) and eat our caramel apples for lunch.

This evening I went with my parents to see Into the Woods, which is the latest offering by Davis Musical Theater company, and the first play they’ve done in their new theater. The theater is quite obviously not finished – the walls were just bare sheet rock and the theater area itself was notably lacking in all the finishes which would allow theater-appropriate acoustics. So it was often difficult to hear the singers. But we all know the play practically by heart and everyone made allowances for the building’s still unfinished status and because it is one of my favorite plays, I was extremely relieved that despite the issue with the acoustics, they did a truly wonderful job.

We were on our way home from another meeting up in Seattle – although this one started late enough in the morning that we could fly up and fly home in the same day. There was enough time between when the meeting finished and when our flight was to leave that we could take our time; relax in the huge open area in the central terminal at the airport and even get something to eat.

It’s one of the nicer central terminal areas I’ve seen in my years of traveling. There are a few shops and food vendors ringing the perimeter, but the bulk of it is a huge open space, fronted by an entire, vast wall of windows that look out onto the runway. It was uniquely designed so that even though the area was crowded, the noise was muffled, so much so that we could converse in normal tones of voice.

I’m not sure which of us noticed it first, but eventually it caught us both. Hanging from the ceiling, suspended from nearly invisible wires, were hundreds of glass and metal objects, most of them appearing as if they were only a few inches across. In the bottom half of the midair sculpture the objects were fish, dolphins, surfboards, flotation rings, and other objects in a pale silvery blue. The arrangement was intersected at the center with a series of thin metal rings, and above it the shape of a huge bird was visible, composed entirely of hundreds of tiny brown and gold glass birds.

It took us a while, staring up at the sculpture, to realize that the bottom piece was actually the bird in reverse; in fact, it was the bird’s reflection. And then we could see that the metal rings were meant to represent the surface of the water, disturbed by the bird’s feet as they hit the water, and further emphasized by the tiny crystals – representing the spray of water flying upward from the impact – which hung just above the ‘water’, noticeable only once we started to look more closely. The longer we stared, craning our heads upward to catch all the details, the more we saw – the way the wires blended into the criss-cross patchwork of the ceiling so far above that they looked as if they just stopped in midair; the way the two images mirrored each other, one made of hundreds of tiny shimmering fish, and the other of hundreds of tiny soaring birds.

I am not normally a person who notices art, except to note that perhaps the colors are pretty together, or the image is nice, or disturbing, or funny. But very rarely does a piece make me stop and stare and want to see more.

I did not pull out my camera because I had a feeling I would be unable to capture the full impact of the sculpture that hung so high above our heads. The only pictures I’ve found online also fail to do the whole thing justice – they show only a collection of tiny dots that make up a shape, without expressing just how diverse and detailed each of those invididual pieces are. Maybe this is just something that isn’t meant to be photographed; that you have to see in person. And I wonder how many thousands of people pass through that terminal each day, in a rush to get to their flight, too busy or too tired, or too stressed to appreciate the openness of that area; the wide expanse of windows; the bird soaring overhead, forever just touching down on the surface of some nearly invisible lake, wings outspread, made up of a myriad of tiny objects hung in so precise a manner that it makes my head spin just thinking of how someone could actually assemble it without going just the slightest bit mad.

It occurred to me, at some point this evening, that when my older sister called earlier today I should have suggested meeting her at the mall. She was off on a solo shopping trip to find shoes and pants, and I too need shoes and pants, and lately it seems as if I rarely ever see her anymore, and this would have been a perfect opportunity. But when she called I’d been home less than an hour. I was tired from my most recent trip; tired of driving and being stuck in a car, and I surrounded by a small cluster of cats who were doing their best to convey just how glad they were to see me again, since I had gone away and left them for years and years during the past 72 hours and for even longer during that three day workshop earlier in the week. So the last thing my mind was capable of was pondering getting back in the car so soon. I have a little regret for not considering it sooner, and maybe next time I will remember this and it will click in my head that meeting my sister at the mall to look for shoes and try on pants and commiserate with each other in the dressing room, and possibly also stop for ice cream or at least share a side of fries in the food court would be a far better use of my time than collapsing into a chair in front of my computer and plowing through 72 hours worth of email which turned out to be mostly spam anyway. Oh well.

But the reason I was so tired was at least a good one. A friend at one of the knitting groups I attend had mentioned in passing several months ago that there was a knitting retreat being planned up in the Medford / Ashland area, and after a very short time of considering it, I decided it sounded like too much fun to pass up. I also tossed the idea past my knitting mom, and so the two of us made plans to drive up together, share a hotel room, and spend a weekend with a bunch of other women doing one of our favorite things – playing with sticks and yarn.

There were a few bumps in the process over the past few weeks. The trip to Red Bluff last week was originally supposed to be from Wednesday through Friday, which meant we started working out to get her up to Red Bluff so that the two of us could then continue on to Medford together (since Red Bluff’s about halfway there), but then the workshop dates changed, so I came home Thursday instead of finishing Friday, and even though I was home less than 24 hours, still it was vastly preferrable not getting to come home in between at all.

It was grey and cloudy most of the weekend in southern Oregon, but it really didn’t matter. There were 30 or 35 of us gathered into one hotel in Medford, and we all crowded together into the too-small conference room above the lobby the first night to knit and get acquainted and take a class, and knit some more. I found it pretty amusing that the Solano County contingent was the largest one there – I think there were likely a dozen of us from that area. The rest of the attendees came from Washington, Oregon, other parts of California, and there was even one woman who flew down from Juneau, Alaska.

We had a wonderful time. There was an incredible dinner at a steak place in downtown Medford for a small group of us who already knew each other. There were field trips planned to knitting stores in Medford and Ashland, and the stores greeted us with smiles and hot drinks snacks, since we were, after all, 30+ women descending on their stores with the sole purpose of buying great quantities of nothing but yarn, yarn, and more yarn. There was a class in shadow knitting on Friday night, and a class in Continental knitting on Saturday. A small group of us skipped the Saturday class since we already knew how to knit that way, so instead we sat in the lobby in the couches by the fireplace and talked and knit and talked some more. In fact, that was pretty much most of the weekend – knitting and talking and a lot of laughter and sharing of stories, some to do with yarn and some having nothing to do with knitting at all. There was enough time left between yarn shop field trips and classes for those who wanted to to explore the area (and in fact some of the attendees discovered yet another yarn shop in Jacksonville and did even more yarn acquisition).

My knitting mom and I were, for the most part, quite restrained during the weekend when it came to buying yarn. I’ve been trying to be good about only buying yarn for specific projects, but when faced with the giant display of sock yarns in both store – colors and brands and patterns that I’ve never seen before – well, there is only so much restraint a knitter can take. So aside from picking up six balls of cream and black wool blend (for a specific project), I did allow myself to splurge a little. In Medford I picked up some Wildfoote sock yarn in gorgeous bold red colors, and when we left the store in Ashland I came away with three more skeins of sock yarn that simply could not be left behind, plus a few free patterns from their stash in the back, and a list of books that I think I may eventually need to buy.

I learned a nifty new technique – shadow (or illusion) knitting – during this past weekend (go see Knit One, Purr Too if you want pictures) which was cool because it was something I’d wanted to learn anyway. I got to know a few of the others from some of our knitting groups better (and yes, I do appreciate the irony that it took driving over 500 miles away from home to be able to bond with people who live in just the next town over). And I got to spend a deliciously relaxing weekend hanging out with my knitting mom, and a whole group of other women who, while they are all different ages and come from all different backgrounds and locales, were instant friends just because of a not-so-crazy addiction to sticks and yarn.

The meeting yesterday morning was surprisingly short – at least the part we were required to attend. Outside the little building we were in, a series of busses drove up and deposited load after load of high school children in the parking lot, so there was a constant level of noise in the background most of the morning. But eventually they dispersed to whatever it was that brought them to the fairgrounds on a Thursday morning, and by the time we headed out the only sign of their presence were two rather tattered looking bunches of balloons tied to the perimeter fence.

It was nice to be home, even if it’s only been for such a short time – barely even 24 hours. Sebastian came up to me, his fur coarse, as if he wasn’t washing himself very well, but the second I picked him up he started purring at top volume, and then settled himself on his lap and immediately began to bathe. I guess he missed me. Azzie’s been following me around beeping pathetically and acting very clingy, and I am finding it a little endearing, but also a bit ridiculous because for crying out loud, I was only gone 3 days, and it’s not as if there wasn’t anyone else here!

I’ve packed up my bags again and am just about to head back up I-5 – although this time we’ll go twice as far up the road, to Medford. My knitting mom and I are off to a knitting retreat. I have a can of cookies I made yesterday afternoon, in between napping and doing laundry and going to choir practice, where I discovered that singing when ones sinuses are seriously congested can create a rather unpleasant vibration in one’s head. My suitcase of yarn and knitting paraphanelia is larger than the bag containing my clothes, but I suspect that this will likely be the case for most of the attendees. All I have left to do is pack a lunch for the trip, toss my bags into the car, and go, which I think I shall do as soon as I post this.

It was a quiet Halloween. I’m still sick and I had to leave for my business trip that evening anyway, so we didn’t really have time to watch a horror movie or do much of anything else besides eat dinner and toss candy at little kids in costume. So we made mummy dogs for dinner – hot dogs wrapped in strips of crescent roll dough (the type that comes in the can). It’s something we’d seen in a little recipe book my mom picked up a few weeks ago, and it amused us so much we had to try them. They were easy and fun, and turned out pretty tasty. Not exactly the healthiest dinner for two grown adults, but it’s Halloween, and since we deliberately chose candy that neither of us likes to hand out to the trick-or-treaters, so we figured we were entitled to at least some kind of treat.

My coworker and I headed out to Red Bluff late Halloween night – coincidently just about the time we ran out of candy and shut off all the lights. Driving down I-5, whether north or south, is never much more than a bleak experience, because it’s a freeway whose designers seemed determined to lay it out through the ugliest, dullest parts of the state. Driving north on I-5 at night is even worse, because when it is dark, there is nothing to see at all, and you only know you’ve gone somewhere because eventually you come upon yet another truck stop with a different name and configuration than the last one you saw a millennium ago.

We have spent the past two days in meetings in a tiny little room on the Tehama county fairgrounds, and we’ll do it tomorrow too, although for only a few hours instead of the entire day. My role in all of this is, as usual, to lurk in the back and take copious notes so that I can produce a decent draft of the report that is the outcome of these sorts of workshops. And when I am not taking notes, I have been either trying very hard not to hack up a lung (stupid winter cold) or else killing the wasps which keep sneaking in from who knows where, and hovering around the window that is right next to the little table where I’ve been sitting. I’ve tried to be rather discreet about it, but it’s starting to creep me out a little because even when the doors and windows are shut they still keep showing up.

Aside from being sick, the workshop itself feels as if it’s gone rather well. Plus, it has the benefit of an architect who has been madly sketching out design alternatives on the fly over the past two days, to the point where his little section of the table has slowly been buried under a great mount of that thin, almost translucent paper that architects use, and occasionally the woman sitting next to him had to rummage underneath the mess to find something of hers. His enthusiasm and tireless ability to keep rolling with all the suggestions and changes has been something marvelous to watch.

I’m back in my hotel room now, tired and wishing that when I wake up tomorrow I won’t be coughing all the time, and also wondering if combining cold medication and some serious decongestants would be okay because to be honest, I’m starting to get a little desperate here. So instead of mixing drugs at random in the hopes of being able to breathe again, I shall tell you about Red Bluff – at least what I have seen of it so far.

Red Bluff is not, so far, a very exciting sort of place. Everything we’ve seen, while wandering aimlessly in the hope of tracking down someplace to go for lunch, suggests that this is not the sort of place people come to unless they have a really good reason. The few people in the meetings who are actually from around here have only confirmed this perception.

At dinner we sat beside a table of people who were talking about their trucks and their guns. And last night while watching TV I saw a commercial for a tattoo parlor during a prime time show. I realize that my being sick and feeling so crummy certainly colors how I feel about this place, so I am trying to maintain some optimism that Red Bluff really is not the hick sort of town it seems to be, but so far everything we’ve experienced certainly hasn’t helped.

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.