Despite what anyone might say about Seattle and its lack of pretty weather, I have visited my little sister several times now and experienced not only nice weather, but sun. Yes, actual sun in Seattle, for more than an hour at a stretch.

Saturday was a mostly quiet day. We slept in as much as our internal clocks – used to getting up early to go work out, or else used to being trampled by the cats, demanding attention and possibly treats – would let us. Then we woke up and said good morning to my little niece and lounged around in the living room while my little sister made us pancakes from scratch. She’s in school now to become a pastry chef so I suppose the fact that she makes baked goods from scratch is understandable. Fiona decided that Uncle Richard was great fun to play with (all the little kids seem to agree, after all). I watched them and worked on my cardigan, and chatted with my little sister and her husband.

After breakfast we drove around in circles for a while looking for a pumpkin patch that never materialized. So instead we went to a huge produce stand and picked out pumpkins from a massive display in every shape and size. It being Washington, they also had too many varieties of apples to count, and apparently Washington is also a big squash growing state, since there were varieties there I’d never even heard of.

After filling a cart with pumpkins then it was time for Fiona’s soccer game. When soccer is played by 4 and 5 year olds it isn’t so much soccer as a bunch of very small people running about in a slightly chaotic manner around on a grassy field, wearing little outfits that are far too big for them because their parents are hoping they can get through at least one season without having to buy new ones, and sometimes doing something that actually has to do with a soccer ball. There were a few that seemed to take it rather seriously and ran across the field with determined looks on their little faces, which made it even cuter.

The plan after the soccer game had been to carve the pumpkins and make homemade pizza, but when we got back to their house everyone was exhausted. So instead everyone crashed on their respective beds or couches and took a very long nap and by the time we all woke up again we decided to just order pizza instead. While we were waiting, there was more playing with Fiona, and more knitting on the cardigan, and my little sister and I made a chocolate raspberry torte. Or rather, she made the chocolate dough crust and poured things into the pan for the ganache filling, and I dutifully stood by the stove and stirred and we chatted about school and tarts and work and cats. Later on my sister very nicely let us log on to check our email because we are both big nerds, and it was a lovely day.

When we put in our order for the Prius we had hoped it would arrive by the time we went up to Ashland in May. Of course, that didn’t happen and it took two more months before it finally showed up at the dealers so we could drive it away. But that desire to take our cute little car on a road trip didn’t go away just because it came late. Add to that the recent opening of the new Science Fiction museum, as well as the fact that neither of us has spent much time (if any) in Seattle itself, and suddenly plans for this weekend’s road trip were born.

We packed up as much as we could on Thursday night, but the nice thing about driving, as opposed to flying, is that if you forget something you can always turn around and go back for it so there was no stress. I had to get up early anyway because I’d promised my mom I’d meet her at Curves to work out before we left. Once I got home from that it didn’t take us much longer to toss everything into the car and hit the road.

The first stretch of the drive up to Seattle is not very exciting, mainly because there is nothing remotely exciting about I-5 pretty much its entire length through California. I suppose it helped that we’d driven this part before, back in May, so had a better sense of how long it would take us to get to Ashland, and a few years back I flew up to Portland to meet Richard (who’d been up there for work) and we drove from Portland to Seattle to spend the weekend with my little sister and her family. It was just the stretch from Ashland to Portland that was a big mystery.

I drove the first leg, while Richard either dosed or read. He packed his mp3 player so I had plenty of music to sing along to. We lunched at wonderful little vegetarian restaurant in Ashland (their baklava was divine), and then got back in the car and drove and drove and drove. At one point, back when I had no idea quite how long it would take us to get from Ashland to Portland, I suggested we might have time to swing by Powell’s books, which I have heard great things about but have not yet seen. However, we didn’t hit Portland until long past dinnertime and by that point it was dark and raining and I was sick to death of being in the car and most of all I did not want to make my little sister have to wait up for us until the wee hours of the morning just so we could stop and see a bookstore. So we stopped off at a Denny’s for dinner because it was right off the road and then we got back in the car and peered blearily at the directions and a little less than three hours later we were pulling into their driveway and finally there. No matter how much you are looking forward to seeing the people you are going to see, or how much you love the people you are in the car with, 18 hours with only one break is a very, very long time to be stuck in a car on the road.

Today started far too early for me, especially since we were up late going to a movie last night. But I wasn’t about to miss practice, no matter how badly I wished I could just stay in bed. So instead I dragged myself out of bed and got dressed and zipped off to go scrounge up some breakfast and some coffee, and then joined the other early birds at the church for our monthly recorder ensemble practice time. That was followed by practice for the instrumental ensemble, and then church, and it was only by the time the service was mostly over that I felt as if all the caffeine had finally kicked in.

This afternoon I headed back to the church, but this time to make use of the nice big kitchen, especially the nice big six-burner stove. We had a slightly smaller group this year for the jelly making, but it turned out that four was the perfect number. And having all the pomegranates pre-juiced made such a big difference.

As it was it took us three hours to make all the jelly, and we were busy that entire time. We had two huge pots in the back to sterilize jars and give finished jars the required water bath. On the front burners we kept two batches of jelly, rotating things around as timing required. Occasionally someone would come in to see how (and what) we were doing, but mostly it was just the four of us, talking, laughing, making jelly, and generally having a wonderful time.

It’s a funny thing about cooking and baking and canning. There’s something very soothing about the process of making things – especially pretty things like jelly. And to be able to do it with friends is even better. We talked about other jelly possibilities and decided to try to organize another weekend of jelly production (although this time something slightly less time intensive than pomegranates!). I’ve been toying with the idea of trying to whip up a batch of spiced apple jelly at home, just for Richard and me, but doing it with friends sounds like much more fun.

We made 62 jars of jelly this year – about 2 batches more than last year, I think – and stacked them all in a cupboard at the church. Later on we’ll add labels and decorative tops and price tags and feel that sense of accomplishment when every single jar is sold at the holiday bazaar. It’s a long and tedious process but once it’s done there’s this strange little feeling of euphoria that makes us just want to do it again.

After the jelly making, Richard and I followed one of our friends back to her mom’s house, because her mom has five little foster babies. After everything that’s happened the last few weeks with our cats, I was in desperate need of some kitten therapy, and her mom knew that. So she let us in and we sat on the floor of the kitchen and played with babies.

Oh, they are just so precious. Four of them are all thick furred – two white with tabby patches, one white with calico patches, one little black baby with white toes and white whiskers. The fifth is a scrappy little dilute tortie who feels that the best way to absorb enough food is to stand directly *in* the plate and squish as much as possible between her little toes while eating.

It’s impossible to be sad when you are being used as a jungle gym by five little fuzzy balls of pure whiskery cute, especially when those little tykes have *just* gotten enough coordination to figure out how to pounce and skitter. I just wanted to stick them all into my pocket and take them home with me so I can take them out any time I need more kitten therapy. There’s just something about tiny babies that makes everything seem okay again.

I woke up this morning surrounded by cats, since it’s started to get cooler and that means more feline snuggling in our house. Then we headed off to get hair cuts because we both were in desperate need of them. There was a short period of wait between Richard’s and mine so we took that opportunity to swing by a nearby mall and meander the Halloween decorations at Target. A very goofy metal spider (which doubles as a candle holder) and a wonderful black metal tree with glowing eyes had to come home with us. Then it was back to the shop for me to get my bi-yearly trim, and we headed for home. Except on the way I suggested we swing by CostCo, and while we didn’t end up buying very much there (beyond making a ‘lunch’ out of all the samples around the store), as we were pulling out of the parking lot, I spied a Grand Opening Sale sign at a new furniture store and we decided to go in, just to look around.

Famous last words, right? We left with a gorgeous sofa table in the trunk of the car, for an unbeatable price. It matches absolutely nothing of our current living room furniture, but it’s the style we both love and it’s what the living room is going to be filled with, some day, probably years from now. And one does not pass up on incredible bargains when both of us fell instantly in love with it.

Back home Richard decided to head off to Borders to do some writing, and I stayed home to tackle phase 2 of the pomegranates, which was to drag all the bags of seeds out of our freezer (which seems so amazingly empty now that they are gone) and boil them down for juice. I don’t have any cheesecloth, but I’ve got a pile of cloths I use for cooling cookies during the winter baking season, and they were thin enough to work. So I lined a colander with one of those, and as each batch finished cooking I poured the mess of seeds and liquid into the colander and then commenced the tedious and slightly painful process of squishing all possible juice out of the (very hot, because they had just been boiled) seeds. It took me a few hours but I managed to juice them all (and filled two huge pitchers with pomegranate juice. Richard’s timing was perfect; he came in just as I was finishing the last batch.

My parents went to Apple Hill, which was amusing because we’d originally planned on going there ourselves today, but decided against it because we weren’t sure we would have been able to get there. There’ve been some pretty horrible fires all over the valley over the last few days – so many and so fierce that the air was thick with smoke and ash in the Sacramento area most of Thursday and Friday, and freeways were closed further north and east. However, my parents made it up there despite all that, and what was even better, they brought us back caramel apples from the place that sells the best caramel apples in the entire world. Naturally, we had no choice but to eat them immediately. Since it was dinnertime, those became our dinner. The apples are always so juicy and the caramel so rich and buttery and they are a complete sweet and sticky mess to eat, but oh, they are so good.

I decided I needed to get at least a little knitting done so I finished off a baby blanket for a friend’s soon-to-be-born little boy, and then because we both love cheesy zombie movies and because the previews looked like it would be fun, we decided to go see Shawn of the Dead.

It was marvelous. There were some wonderfully funny parts, but there were also some deeply poignant sections too. Despite the fact that it was a zombie movie, and a zombie movie turned comedy at that, it was actually quite well done. As much as I enjoyed the remake of Dawn of the Dead, I think we both liked Shawn of the Dead more.

I’ve been avoiding going to the gym for the past few months because I really have not been enjoying it at all. A few weeks ago my mom asked me about Curves, since there’s one in town, and so last week we started going together. And this morning after doing a free week’s trial (mainly to see if my mom liked it) we finally signed up for good.

Yes, I know that I quit Curves earlier because it had gotten too easy, but I figure the important thing is that I at least get some regular exercise, and while the gym might be a better workout, it’s not any kind of useful workout if I’m just not even going. Plus having my mom do this with me means that we can’t just roll over, smack at the snooze button on the alarm clock, and tell ourselves that we’ll just work out another day.

All this is just to explain why it is that I finally got around to getting my very first mammogram. Curves had a special where if you showed proof of a mammogram, they’d waive the service fee (which, at $150, was enough money to convince us we might as well suck it up and go do the damn exam). I called, expecting I’d have to wait a few months, but ‘luckily’ they had some cancellations so I got mine yesterday morning.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting. You hear horror stories all the time about cold metal plates, lots of painful squishing and manipulating of appendages that were not meant to withstand that sort of abuse, and so on. But either I just got lucky, or those machines have been drastically improved over time. Granted it was more than a little disconcerting to have to stand there while the tech poked and prodded to make sure everything was in the right position for optimum squashage. And it was especially ‘amusing’ when I was told for each shot to ‘just take a deep breath and relax’ – not so easy to do when one corner of the thing is digging into your armpit and a large machine is trying to turn one of your breasts into a pancake. But it was over quickly and I saved myself a pile of money by getting the darn thing and I’m sure it will make my doctor happy and at least now I have it out of the way and will (hopefully) not have to do this again for a number of years.

And in the meantime I am back to exercising regularly, at the ungodly hour of 6:45 in the morning, three days a week, because we are all about being healthy around here, by golly. Yay me.

October, I have decided, has it in for me. Or rather, it has it in for my cats.

First there was Rebecca, who keeled over on my head last Monday and died shortly thereafter. I’m not going to be over that one for a while, although I’ve at least stopped tearing up when I think about it.

Now, it’s Allegra. No, she’s not dead, but the key word here is ‘yet’. A few months ago I noticed she had a strange, hard lump on her lower jaw. We kept an eye on it – it didn’t seem to bother her at all but it wasn’t going away. So I took her in to the vet. $500 later (yes, I was wincing too) I brought her back home, minus an infected tooth, having subjected her to various and sundry indignities, including some x-rays of her chin. At that time the vet did suggest the possibility that the lump could just be a nasty abscess from the tooth, but then he tossed out a few other, scarier, possibilities. That was two weeks ago.

Today he finally heard back from the radiologist about the x-rays. It’s not an abscess. That would be too easy. She could *recover* from an abscess. She won’t recover from this.

She has bone cancer. Because it came on relatively fast he estimated we have about six months, more or less – as much of an estimate as anyone can give for a cat. Treatment options are pretty limited – we could put her through the hell of radiation and have her lower jaw removed (try explaining that to a cat who already has issues with being medicated, force fed, or otherwise manipulated against her will). But there’s no guarantee any of those treatments will ultimately be effective, nor can I justify doing something like that to her anyway.

I want to hit something, or someone. I want to scream and stomp my feet and yell at the top of my lungs that this is not fair, damn it; it’s not supposed to be like this; first Rebecca and now her. I want to know the exact number of days I have left with her so I can prepare myself somehow, some way, to be strong enough to make the decision I do not want to make.

Eventually she will stop eating on her own. Eventually she will start feeling pain. Eventually this thing that is growing in her jaw will win the fight. And eventually I will have to put my little musical cat to sleep.

My fingers are still all kinds of yellow-green lovely, but that is because I shucked the third bag of pomegranates last night, thereby not giving the stain from Friday night a chance to wear away. I am hopeful, however, that a bit of energetic scrubbing later on today will get rid of the worst of the stains, and glad that the next phase of this project – boiling the seeds down to juice – will at least not turn me any other funny colors.

I did, as hoped, manage to pass the fourth sack along to someone else to shuck this evening. This gave me the perfect excuse to go over to her house and gush over her kittens. They are long and lanky little things, with huge tufted ears and out-of-proportion bodies. Some kittens need to grow into their paws; these need to grow into the length of their legs. They were perfectly friendly and cuddly, except when there was food involved, and then it was every kitten for himself (and woe be unto any human skin in the way).

Today has been a fairly quiet and low-key day, compared to this past weekend. There was the tea on Saturday, and then Sunday was the usual combination of choir practice and church service. We hosted the coffee hour, so there was extra time spent washing dishes and wiping down tables afterward; then we rushed home to change into more appropriate clothes, inhale some kind of lunch, and went right back to the church to meet some of the others in the 20’s and 30’s group for our monthly outing.

It being October, we decided we needed to go to a pumpkin patch. Richard and I went to this place last year – the one with the corn maze – and had so much fun we really wanted to do it again. So we all piled into our cars and headed off to Davis. There was a brief detour along the way because there was a fire and the roads were blocked, but we eventually made it there (along with lots of other people) and had fun.

The website has an aerial view of the maze, so you can see just how huge it is. We all wandered around looking at pumpkins and gourds and various and sundry squash for a little bit, but eventually we decided to head into the maze. They gave us maps, but we were all determined to try it without guidance, at least to start. Of course, that only lasted the first fifteen minutes or so, until we got lost in a fairly long and windy dead end, and eventually met up with a few more of our group and decided to heck with free wandering; we were going to stick to the map so we could at least find our way to the various vantage points and then find the way out.

It’s a strange feeling wandering around in a maze like this. The corn is so high that you cannot see over the stalks, so you lose all sense of direction or distance. We made our way over to the bridge in the middle of the maze, which takes you high enough to look out over the entire thing. And then we meandered up and down paths to another vantage point on the far side, where we could see where we’d come from and were amazed by how far we’d walked. Then finally we wove our way through the maze to the exit. By this time I was holding the map firmly in front of me, one finger tracing the route as we walked, pretty much ignoring everything else but that little piece of paper, and the others just trailed right along behind me. Even with the map I think it took us a good 45 minutes to make it all the way through.

Yesterday I did not touch the pomegranates at all. Instead I got up early and dressed up pretty and picked up a friend and then she and I headed down to San Francisco for the bi-monthly tea. This time it was in a little tea house which was right across the street from the Botanical Gardens. We were rather glad of its proximity to the gardens because we ended up hitting absolutely no traffic at all on the drive into the city, and even after making a brief detour to browse through a weaver’s estate sale (where I exercised great self control and only spent $11 for an amazingly large pile of yarn of indeterminate type), we arrived about an hour early. Heck, not only did we not hit any traffic, but we also found a place to park within one block of the tea house, after only circling the block once, and even more amazing, it was free. Perhaps all that pomegranate shucking and tree wrestling on Friday convinced the gods that I needed a break – who knows.

The tea house did not even open until noon, which was when we were actually supposed to arrive, so to pass the extra time we decided to go wandering around in the Botanical Gardens. I’d never been there and she said it had been years for her, so it was a (mostly) new experience for us both.

That place is huge! I can see that we would have needed a lot more time to wander the whole thing; as it was we barely made a dent in the gardens and I fell in love with half a dozen trees and shrubs and flowers whose names I promptly forgot and which I probably could never grow in my area anyway. And then we spent the remaining fifteen minutes or so sitting on a bench in a tiny little courtyard, watching people walk by, before we returned to the tea house, and eventually met up with the rest of our group.

It was a slightly smaller group than last time, but still just as lively and fun. As I expected, even after a two month reprieve, I was still the only one who had actually read Anna Karinena, so I think the book club part of the tea group has officially fizzled away. We each got a different type of tea – mine had delicious overtones of spearmint, which I adore – and munched our way through an assortment of the usual type of tea sandwiches.

Now for the not-so-fun and a little scary part of the adventure. While leaving the estate sale earlier I was sneezing pretty badly, and figured there was probably something there I was allergic to. So I ended up taking an allergy pill – one of the Zyrtec samples my doctor gave me when I went in for the allergy testing. By the time the tea was over I was feeling pretty tired, but luckily everyone else was ready to head out so we found the car and headed home. And by the time I had reached our little town and dropped off my friend it was all I could do to remain focused and alert. I drove home, parked the car, staggered inside, mumbled some kind of greeting to Richard, and then went upstairs and promptly fell into bed. I got up a few hours later to have dinner, but I was still pretty drained and gave up and went back to sleep shortly thereafter. It wasn’t until this morning that I started feeling more myself again.

So maybe I will avoid taking the Zyrtec allergy medication again – at least if I am going to have to be driving, or even remotely coherent at any point during the next 24 hours. In the meantime, I probably needed the sleep, and curling up into a big soft comfy bed, surrounded by lots of warm and snuggly cats was not so bad a way to end the day.

I love pomegranates. I love them so much that when we were doing our garden plan I insisted that it had to include at least one pomegranate tree. And this past spring our tiny little tree produced exactly two blossoms, both of which fell off shortly after they appeared. But that’s okay – I wasn’t expecting to get actual fruit from any of our trees for a year or two. Besides, we didn’t need pomegranates from my tree for our yearly jelly making party. One of the others in our group has a whole slew of trees and had more than enough of them last year.

Except that this year there were issues with her trees, and suddenly we were faced with a serious shortage of pomegranates. We discussed buying juice, but somehow that seemed like cheating. After all, there are people out there – strange people, to be sure, who have pomegranate trees and do not like pomegranates. I figured surely one of them wouldn’t mind us taking their unwanted fruit off their hands.

So I put a call out to the local Freecyclers group, and within a week I had a response. A very nice couple noted that they had a huge tree overflowing with fruit and I was welcome to come and pick as much as I wanted.

I have already noted that I love pomegranates. But, our tiny little fledgling tree aside, I have never actually had to interact with a pomegranate *tree* before. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Luckily I had the foresight to put on jeans before I headed off to divest their tree of pomegranates, but I should have also put on long sleeves, and maybe even full body armor.

The problem, you see, is that pomegranate trees are not friendly trees. They are, in fact, quite nasty little trees when it comes to harvesting time. Not only are they full of sharp and prickly points, they also refuse to give up their fruit without a fight. Most fruit, when ripe, tends to come off the tree easily, and in fact if not picked in time, will fall off on its own. Not so with pomegranates. When ripe, the fruit remains firmly affixed to the tree, and instead of falling to the ground like any other self-respecting fruit, it simply splits open at the bottom, allowing all the seeds to spill out. Removing the pomegranates themselves takes great strength, determination, and one or more extremely sharp cutting objects.

I did manage to battle the tree long enough to fill four grocery sacks to overflowing with some of the largest pomegranates I have ever seen, and last night I began the rather tedious task of shucking them. There are cuts and scratches all over my arms and even a few on my face, and I was still picking tree parts out of my hair long after I came home from picking the fruit. And my fingers are stained an oh-so-charming yellowish green from several hours of shucking them last night. But there are four gallon Ziploc bags stuffed full of pomegranate seeds in my freezer and only two grocery sacks remain to tackle – one of which I think I may be able to pawn off on another of the jelly-making group to prepare. And after next weekend there will be much making of jelly and I will look back on my encounter with the pomegranate tree and I will decide that it was all worth it.

And I will keep a very careful eye on my own pomegranate tree and maybe invest in some very long-handled gardening shears so I can remove fruit from my own tree with a few less battle scars in the future.

It’s been two weeks since I started the allergy shots and with only two exceptions I’ve gone in religiously, twice a week. I’m still finding the whole experience vaguely amusing, although for a few weeks I was getting this weird side effect where my entire body would start itching insanely after the shot, and that really started to push my tolerance for what constitutes fun. But that’s thankfully gone away, and in fact last week the nurse told me that one of my three shots now is only once a week. Of course the other two are still twice a week, but she also noted that I’m showing great progress on those as well.

This is actually a rather large relief. There was this small part of my brain that was sure that somehow the allergy shots just were not going to work for me. Never mind that they are highly effective and work in every other person that has taken them; somehow I would be that .0001% of the population that wouldn’t respond and I’d be stuck with the sinus infections from hell and the constantly stuffy nose and the exploding into hives and closing-off throat every time I happened to be in the vicinity of where some small fuzzy creature had breathed in the last few days. Silly, I know, but I can’t help it. Worrying is, after all, a genetic trait in my family, especially for things that may not necessary be the most logical to worry about.

But, worries aside, the shots *are* working. The rashes that appear around the shot sites are slowly diminishing in size each week, and the itching and the swelling is starting to subside. I’m hopeful that maybe in another few weeks I’ll be able to only go in once a week for all three of the shots. And maybe by the time Christmas rolls around I’ll be able to go to my friend’s house – the one with the guinea pig – without having to load up on allergy medication beforehand.