Since the last time I wrote in this journal I have somehow managed to crank out an additional 14,000 words. I’d hoped to be up to 25,000 by the end of this weekend, and even that would still have been a few thousand words shy of where I really should be right now. But at least 20,500 words is better than last weekend’s total of only 6000.

There are still two weeks of November to go for me to somehow crack out another 30,000 words. Gah. Can someone remind me, please, why it is that, after doing this once before, I actually agreed to put myself through this *again*?

I baked 8 loaves of pumpkin bread which are now filling up my freezer to the point where getting things in and out of it is a lesson in careful packing, and spent a few hours one evening putting together Igor bars (chocolate chips cookies, peanuts, caramel, rice kripsy treats, melted chocolate, etc., etc.). I finished one sleeve of my nephew’s sweater. I spent two days at work frantically pulling together all the text and paraphernalia needed for two coworkers to do a poster session – excitement which involved me taping out a huge swath of floor and spreading sheets of paper all over that swath in attempts to figure out just how much space we had, tracking down online pictures of poster sessions in order to explain to the other people involved just what the heck a poster session *is*, tracking down pushpins and pamphlet holders, and shipping all of that off overnight so that somehow, miraculously, it all arrived the morning it was due, just in time. I have spent a few hours editing extremely long papers for friends, and reminding myself just how much fun editing can be (Yes I do actually mean fun. Yes, I know that this means there is something very wrong with me). I learned how to burn CD’s on my laptop, and I also learned just how much I apparently stink at computer chess because when asked to figure out six one-move checkmate scenarios in 90 seconds I fail repeatedly. I have done a lot of singing practice and a lot of playing the oboe and not a lot of sleeping. And obviously, I have also been doing a lot of writing.

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About 12 years ago my friend D and I were passing by an adoption site and stopped to look at the kittens. Somehow one of the cage doors had been left unlatched and before we knew it, a tiny black cat scrambled out of her cage, launed herself at D, and claimed her as her very own. One creaky old lady cry later and D was doomed. It didn’t take much time for that tiny little black kitten to worm herself firmly into D’s heart and refuse to let go. That little black kitten and D were made for each other and they both knew it.

Just recently, the little cat that stole D’s heart had to be put to sleep. She had health problems on and off over the past few years, but the latest was an inoperable lung tumor that could not be treated. I might have been worrying about the little things that have plagued my horde lately, but none of those compare to what D has had to deal with; had to face with her very best feline friend.

I know what it’s like to have to make the decision to put an animal to sleep, and it’s even worse when it’s a cat like the one who wormed her way into D’s heart. There are pets you can live with and care for, and then there are the animals who somehow fill that missing piece in your soul and who, when they go away, take that part of you with them and you will never get it back again. She was obnoxious and opinionated and a little bit of a bully but she was always and only D’s. And she will be missed.

I have been a big slacker and done absolutely nothing on my knitting for the entire month of October, so it was a good thing we had craft night Friday night. While we sat at the table I rather hastily finished binding off the top parts and then the woman who’s been helping me showed me how to put together the shoulders and by the end of the night I was mostly done with the neckband. And then yesterday I sat down with it and figured I might as well see if I could figure how how to start the sleeves on my own, and what do you know, it was actually not so hard at all! The sleeves, like the rest of the sweater, are being knit in the round, so there’ll be no seam. In fact the only seam at all is on the shoulders and it’s a pretty uneven seam, I should add, but the good thing is that the my nephew really won’t care, and frankly, if the worst I can say about my very first sweater is that there’s an uneven seam on the shoulder, I really don’t have much to complain about. We just won’t talk about the half dozen spots near the bottom of the sweater where I sort of screwed up on the cabling, now will we?

Anyway, I’ve been merrily knitting away and even figured out how to switch to the double-pointed needles (which look, as my dad noted, as if I am actually building the sweater out of Tinker Toys). One sleeve is almost done now, and unless I become a huge slacker again, it’s looking more and more likely I’ll get this thing done in time for Christmas. Considering how far I have *not* been getting on that dratted novel, I have a sneaky feeling I might get this thing done before the end of the month.

It’s been kind of a hectic weekend, despite me finding a few hours here and there to churn out most of a sweater sleeve. Saturday afternoon was a birthday lunch for a friend, where we wiled away several hours being loud and raucous with laughter. Luckily it was in a restaurant that was already loud and raucous even without our help, so we were in no danger of being kicked out. This was especially useful when we got into the whole noisy discussion of politics (general consensus for our group – the Shrub is an idiot and his administration scares the bejeebus out of all of us).

After lunch Richard went off to see the third Matrix movie. I’d initially planned on going with him but I was getting tired and something I ate didn’t agree with me and so I curled up in bed with a half dozen cats and knitted while he went off to see it by himself. After that we went over to my parents’ for dinner because my dad is back from Germany for a week or so and I thought it might be nice to actually get to *see* him, and during the course of the evening pizza was consumed and my parents thoroughly trounced us in Scrabble.

This morning I got up and realized that I had never finished shucking the rest of those pomegranates, so I did them rather hastily and barely got them done in time to hop in the shower and then head off to church for choir practice. And then after church, and after lunch, Richard and I did a mad scramble around the garage trying to track down all my jelly-making paraphernalia, followed shortly thereafter by a frantic call to my mom asking if I could please, please borrow her strainer and the thing to remove jars from boiling water, and wasn’t it lucky I figured out that I’d forgotten the huge bags of seeds *before* I left town, and then finally I headed off to meander around back country roads until I found the house where the jelly making party was to be. I was greeted by a very tiny dog who wanted to make sure that I knew she was fierce and protective, really she was, and there was a brief detour before the jelly making to go visit the kittens who live in the garage and like to stalk potato bugs, and then five of us all gathered in the kitchen over the oven and a camp stove on the porch, and got down to the serious business of making jelly.

I am not sure exactly how many batches we ended up making because we all sort of lost track after a while, but to give some perspective, I brought a 25 pound bag of sugar with me and I think there’s maybe 5 pounds of sugar left, Also, by the time we were done there was one counter covered in about 50 jars, and of those only two didn’t seal. Only two! Not only that, the first batch or three had already set! Having gone through the frustration of making jelly, only to have it stubbornly refuse to set and instead remain forever a sealed jar of fruit syrup, it was rather a relief to know that this time around was a success.

We decided to take one of the ones that didn’t seal, even though it hadn’t completely set yet, and while two of us stirred various pots of jelly or seeds and two sat at the counter and worked at making cute little fabric tops for the jars, the woman who owns the house rummaged around and produced bread and butter and shortly thereafter produced toast, smothered in our freshly made jelly. It was so good!

We all had a marvelous time, talking and laughing and taking turns switching from task to task, even if by the end of the four hours or so of jelly making we were all sick to death of stirring and pouring and boiling and measuring. When we were finally done, we all whisked around and did our best to return her kitchen to some semblance of pre-jelly normality (or at least without so many purple splatters on counters and floor and walls). And then we all gathered up our things and we each took two jars of jelly for ourselves (which still leaves about 40 jars to sell for the holiday bazaar in two weeks) and headed home.

By the time I got home I was in no mood to do anything at all in the kitchen, so we got a take-and-bake pizza that was just covered in spinach and mushrooms and onions and tomatoes and it was better than any pizza I have had in a very long time. I pondered doing more knitting but then I decided that I had done enough creating for one weekend and I think, despite my plans to make a few loaves of bread tomorrow, that I might just postpone that for another day.

The Pomegranates: Last night after the bible study class, one of the other woman distributed piles and piles of pomegranates to the rest of us to shuck, in preparation for the great jelly making party that is planned for this weekend. I took a bag full and wasn’t sure I’d be able to get them all done. Ha! Last night I dragged out my largest mixing bowl, a knife, and a cutting board, and starting peeling apart pomegranates. It became almost mind-numbingly hypnotic in a way, especially now that I have been taught the super secret perfect way to open a pomegranate. Okay, it’s not all that secret – you just cut through the flower at the top, score the rind in both directions, and then it just pulls apart in sections like an orange. Less splattering of juice (but, I might add, more splattering of escaping seeds).

Her tree produces some divine pomegranates. There were some I would open where the seeds were so dark they were almost black, and every once in a while I just couldn’t stand it anymore and would pop a few into my mouth. Oh, so good! Of course the one drawback to getting pomegranates from the tree is every once in a while I would cut one open and find a rather annoyed little bug who thought he’d found himself a comfy home. Those went down the garbage disposal shortly after doing the dance of the ‘euww’, because they were obviously contaminated with bug cooties and no longer edible.

I have no idea how many pomegranates I shucked last night. All I know is that I was up until after midnight and there are only about seven left in that huge bag, and I filled my big mixing bowl almost to the top with enough seeds to pack a gallon Ziploc bag. My fingers are a rather disturbing shade of sickly yellow green and this morning I kept finding little splotches of purple on the counter and the floor every time I turned around. And with the seeds in my fridge, all the seeds from all the fruit everyone else is shucking, and seeds from pomegranates which may or may not join in the fray, we are going to be making one huge amount of jelly.

The Novel: Yesterday after work I finally sat down and poked at the novel again, bringing the word count up to just shy of 6000 words. I didn’t touch it at all today, nor do I expect I’ll get any time to do a single bit of writing tomorrow, but this weekend, somewhere between the jelly-making festivities, going to see the new Matrix movie, and a friend’s birthday gathering, I’ll have to find a few hours to crack out enough words to at least get me caught up.

The Cats: The good news is that the x-rays came back as normal as could be expected for Sebastian and Rosemary. And the even better news is that, after this, the only reason we have to go back to the vet before the end of the year is for Rebecca’s follow-up bloodwork.

I’m not sure Rosemary and Sebastian were as thrilled about the procedure, considering I dropped them off this morning and they had to spend the entire day at the vet’s office until I could pick them up again after work. But they got to express their displeasure at the whole ordeal to me – loudly – the entire drive home so I am sure that makes up for the indignity at least a little bit. Sebastian got x-rays because of the heart murmur, and right now it looks merely like something we should just monitor. He also needs to lose a little weight. Big surprise there. Rosemary’s x-rays were to make sure she didn’t have any bladder or kidney stones, considering the urinary tract issue, and thankfully she comes up completely clear.

However. Things are not quite so bubbly and rosy as one might think. Because there were crystals in her urine (did I mention we *finally* got a sample?), she now gets to go on a special diet, and worse yet, she’s not allowed to eat the normal food that all the other cats eat. This means, to my extreme dismay and frustration, that we must now put everyone on a meal schedule. All this time we’ve been able to just free feed, but because Rosie can’t eat that food anymore, no one gets it. The only other alternative is to lock her in another room permanently and that just wouldn’t be fair.

So for the next few weeks things are going to be…interesting. She’s on a wet food only diet (prescription), but (all fingers, toes, and other appendages crossed here), assuming she does well, there is a dry version of this food we could try. And if we can switch her to that, it’s possible we could just put everyone on it as well. Assuming, of course, that the cat with irritable bowl can tolerate it, but I am trying very hard not to think about what will happen if she can’t tolerate it, or if Rosie cannot switch to the dry, because right now, this radical shift in feeding schedules and treatment is about all I can currently handle.

Yesterday I flew down to spend the day at the office in Santa Monica with my boss and the architect and a pile of random information that somehow needed to not only be organized into a slide presentation, but also into an accompanying workbook, complete with exercises. Because the majority of us are extremely allergic to the lazy and completely useless method of simply printing out the slides that seems to be what passes for handouts these days at conferences, the workbook took a wee bit more time than it might normally have. But that’s a good thing – I’m sure it is. I’ll be even more sure when my brain recovers from the sheer intensity of the past 48 hours and I have the ability to comprehend rational thought once more.

It’s been a very long two days. Monday we gathered around a conference table with our laptops and spent hours and hours frantically typing, or else swapping USB drives back and forth to transfer files to each other because two of us had no access to the network down there. Then today we all came into the office extra early and continued the mad typing/file swapping for another ten hours before we headed home to lurk bleary-eyed in front of our home computers to take care of all the final tweaking until it was, at last, done. And at this point I suppose a small cheer or dance of glee might have been appropriate but by then I was tired and really, I no longer cared.

I didn’t get home until after 10pm last night and that was only because while sitting in the terminal waiting for our plane we heard the boarding call for an early flight to Sacramento and decided to see if we could do a quick ticket switch. It only bought us an extra half hour but somehow, not having to sit in an airport for an extra thirty minutes made a big difference. And then, despite vague discussions of how we would actually try to *work* on the plane (yeah right), we did not do one bit of anything productive, and instead entertained ourselves on the flight home by flipping through the Skymall catalog and pointing out all the must-have gifts to each other. In the Christmas tree category it was a toss-up between which was tackier – the fiber optic tree made of fake poinsettias, or the remote control tree, which allows you to switch the light patterns and colors on your tree at the touch of a button. Because really, surely you have nothing better to spend 350 bucks on, right? In the category of most useless kitchen appliances, we found the pop-up hot dog cooker. No one who values his or her gourmet snootiness should ever be without their very own pocket pepper grinder (mock if you must but I actually knew a guy who would probably have bought this). And if those stupid light-up reindeer, icicle lights, and drape lights were not tacky enough for you, now you can make your house look like it’s being attacked by a snow flurry! Will the wonders ever cease?

However, lest you think we spent the whole flight mocking stupid things for sale, I should note that every once in a while, those catalogs do have something that, while expensively impractical, is also really cool. My boss and I both agreed that this wins, hands down. Because how incredibly cool would it be to be able to just tug this little thing out of your watch to upload or download data! Or perhaps I should put it a different way. How better to announce your ultimate nerdness to the entire world than with a 256 MB USB Drive watch.

Nanowrimo started this weekend, and I kicked yesterday off with a rousing 2300 words. I doubt I’ll be able to keep up that kind of pace on a daily basis, especially since today so far I haven’t added a word, and tomorrow I have to get on a plane and I am not foreseeing lots of time between then and when I return home (which will be after 10 at night) for lots of non-work scribbling. But hey, at least it was a great way to get the month started.

This year, unlike the last time we did this, we decided to actually take part in some of the pre-November festivities. To that end, we went to the Sacramento area kick-off party on Tuesday night, where we met another dozen or so people from all around us who have signed on for this insanity as well. Amusingly, one of them was someone I knew from my PernMUSH days, and one was someone Richard knew from years ago as well. We drank coffee and ate cookies and those of us who’ve done this before gave our best advice. We all introduced ourselves and those who actually had a clue talked about what they were going to write about, while those of us who hadn’t yet figured things out that far (that would be me, in case you were wondering) just made vague babblings of genre and time period and left it at that.

I was inspired to write yesterday, but so far haven’t been at all. I’m using cooking and cleaning as a delaying tactic, however, and it’s working marvelously so far. I’ve done two batches of nut bread – two regular loaves and a half dozen mini loaves. I put together a faux meatloaf (a bizarre concoction of walnuts, bran flakes and cottage cheese that somehow works) and then, since yesterday we picked up a butternut squash while at Apple Hill (among other things), I decided to give squash gnocchi a try. Considering how much I hate squash, this was a big step for me, but they kept insisting it didn’t even taste like squash, so I figured maybe it was worth a shot. After all, it was a good sign that at least I could *cut* the butternut squash into pieces, unlike the last time I gave squash a try. It was a bit messy and sticky and I apparently need a lot more practice making gnocchi because they looked a lot more like rather warty little dumplings. But looks aside, it was worth the try. This is a recipe we’re definitely keeping – a good thing, since there’s still half the squash left and I have no idea just what the heck I could do with it if this didn’t turn out.

Thursday morning – that would be the same day I lugged Sebastian into the vet, in case you’re keeping score – I saw Rosemary in the litter box and it looked like she was straining, followed by what looked like a little blood in what came out. Thursday night, a repeat performance, and Friday each time she went to the litter box she would strain and strain and nothing would happen.

Friday at work after finally managing to get everyone involved in this presentation that *must* be done by next week on the phone together, my boss decided the best way to finish this is to have us all in the same place. Hence, I now have tickets to Los Angeles, to spend all of Monday and possibly Tuesday at the office in Santa Monica. With that looming over my head, I knew that there was no way I’d be able to get Rosie in to the vet until the end of next week – and if this is a urinary tract infection, we really didn’t want to wait that long. So this afternoon, on the way back from Apple Hill (because it was time for our yearly dose of the best caramel apples ever), Richard called the vet to see if we could squeeze her in. They very nicely agreed to give it a try, so we dashed home, tossed her in a carrier (where she expressed her displeasure most pathetically), and the verdict is that tomorrow we will have to figure out some way to collect a urine sample so Richard can take that in on Monday to have it checked so we can figure out just what it is. Oh, and best of all, in the meantime she gets a pill once a day. Have I mentioned before how much Rosie *hates* being medicated (or how next-to-impossible it is to medicate her as a result)?

So if you’re keeping score at home in the game of How High is the Vet Bill Today, so far in the past three months we’ve had to have teeth cleaned and extracted, hyperthyroid treatment in the form of blood tests, pills, creams, and radioactive iodine, tests and treatment for a strange growth on the head, and now a possible urinary tract infection, all spread out between three of the cats. I have been eying the other four cats warily and am doing my best to convey to them the utmost importance of remaining healthy, by golly, because otherwise Richard and I are going to look in our stockings on Christmas morning, and instead of candy and presents, there will be rolls of vet bills, which are certainly not any sort of happy gift, no matter how festively one might tie them up with big velvet bows.

Wasn’t it just yesterday I walked outside the office to go to Curves at lunchtime and had to climb into an oven that was formerly my car? And wasn’t it just earlier this week that my coworker wasn’t even willing to sit outside on the balcony because it was too hot?

Apparently the weather gods were listening and decided enough was enough. Today autumn hit with a vengeance. By the time I got home from work it was cold enough inside that I immediately dashed upstairs and down, turning off every single ceiling fan. Later I wrapped myself in my big fleece bathrobe before skimming through my email, and before I went to choir practice I changed out of my work clothes and into a sweatshirt and jeans. Tonight will the first night in a very long time where we will leave the windows closed. Tonight is the first night in a long time I can actually start thinking seriously about putting on the flannel sheets, and maybe even cranking up the gas fireplace in the bedroom. Today was the first day that actually felt as if it might possibly be October.

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I left work a little early this afternoon in order to get home in time to grab Sebastian, stuff him in a carrier, and head off to the vet. He’s had a small growth on his head, right near the inner corner of one of his eye, and it’s been there for weeks. I’ve been eying it anxiously for quite a while, trying to be patient enough to let it go away if it was something as simple as a scab. But it didn’t go away, and while it didn’t get any bigger and it didn’t seem to bother him very much, that didn’t much matter, because cats are not supposed to randomly grow little things on their skin without some kind of really good reason.

The vet poked and prodded (and weighed him – he’s up to 17 pounds, and oh boy could I feel it when I was lugging around that carrier!), and then decided to try to get a sample to send off to the lab. One dab of topical numbing cream and a thin needle prick later and suddenly it wasn’t nearly as scary any more. As near as we can figure, it was just some sort of little cyst. He’s going to send the sample off to the labs anyway just in case, because after all, Sebastian is 12 years old now.

But while the whole strange growth on the face incident appears to have dissolved into nothing too horrible, we did discover that he has a heart murmur – something which isn’t exactly a good thing. I doubt it’s for the same reason as Rebecca (see the earlier note that he is *up* to 17 pounds), but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s nothing to worry about. Rebecca goes in for follow-up blood tests in a few months so I’ll be carting them both back to the vet so he can check his heart again, and so we can discuss options for how to proceed next.

I’m not sure exactly when it started, because this sort of thing tends to come on so slowly that you don’t really quite realize it’s happening until it’s there. All I know is that in the last few months I’ve started having a hard time seeing. It’s not all the time, luckily, but when I am tired things have this tendency to start to blur together, and when I am driving it has been harder and harder for me to read street signs until I am almost upon them, and after spending an entire day staring at a computer screen my head starts to hurt and lately I sometimes feel nauseous when the blur begins. And the worst of it is, if I really think hard and concentrate, I *can* see things okay. But I know that seeing shouldn’t require this much effort. And it’s been worrying me more and more the more I notice it.

I know it’s not presbyopia, which is what happens when you get older (older than I am now, at least) and you start having a hard time seeing things close up. Age-related far-sightedness is probably the best way to describe it. I have always been near-sighted, so the prospect of going far-sighted is almost a bit intriguing. Or rather, it might have been intriguing back when I still wore glasses and contacts and staggered around in a blur without some form of corrective lenses.

I don’t know how old I was when I first got glasses, but I do know I was very young; still in elementary school. I wore glasses up until high school, at which time I finally wheedled my parents into letting me get contacts. Naturally, it was at this point that I discovered my rather nasty allergy to thimerisol, which was a mercury-based component of a lot of the saline storage and cleaning solutions used for contacts back then. After dealing with puffy, reddened, crusty eyes for days on end an optometrist finally clued in on why I was having such a bad reaction to contacts, switched me to a thimerisol-free solution, and the glasses were relegated to something I only wore on days I was feeling so slothful I barely got dressed, let alone combed the hair or put on contacts.

I hated wearing glasses and it had nothing whatsoever to do with vanity and everything to do with convenience. They fog up when it is cold outside and they slide down your nose when it’s hot and you are all sweaty. They get scratched and they get dusty and they get lopsided and loose. They break and they can be lost or sat on or bent. And contacts, while free of the fogging and sliding and scratching problems, are just as much of a hassle – with all the little containers and the solutions and the drops and what have you. I know there are those of you out there who are deliriously happy with your glasses and your contacts and more power to you if that’s what floats your boat. But by the time I made the decision to do something permanent about it I had been wearing some kind of corrective lenses for nearly 25 years of my life and I was pretty darn sick of the whole thing.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I got the lasik surgery, but I do know it has been at least five years (perhaps six? I’m not sure). My left eye’s always been the bad one – the right eye is nearly normal and so they only had to zap the left one. I thought the entire process was fascinating. In and out in less than ten minutes, home with a horrible headache from the feeling that something had scratched my eye (well, technically, something had), and the next morning I woke up and could see clearly, without the need for glasses or contacts. Based on the fact that I was in my late 20’s, I figured I had a good ten or fifteen years until I would be faced with the need for corrective lenses ever again.

Ha. Apparently that was just wishful thinking on my part. After spending weeks trying to convince myself that these stupid vision issues weren’t really all that much of a problem, last night I finally broke down and tracked down an optometrist who is open in the evenings (who knew the Costco membership would be this useful?). She did all her magical incantations and used her mysterious machines and made me squint at all manner of little pictures and letters, and then finally gave me my verdict.

I have mild astigmatism. While my vision hasn’t changed one smidge since the lasik surgery, the left eye has decided to go ever so slightly off. It’s not enough to warrant another zap of the laser (which would have been my preferred choice), and it’s not enough to send me back to wearing contacts fulltime (secondary preference), but it’s enough to warrant me having to get glasses.

We picked out a pair of octagon-shaped, rimless lenses, and today I drove off to the nearest Costco (their computers were down last night) to drop off the prescription and my order. In a week or so I’ll have them back. To say that I am not looking forward to their impending arrival is putting it mildly. The only bright spot in this whole mess is that they are only for temporary use, like driving. At the very least I will not have to wear them all the time. Whee.

Glasses. I am back to having to wear glasses.

Sigh.

Apparently we are completely out of the loop in our household these days, because if it hadn’t been for a stray reference in Stacy’s last journal entry, we would have not figured out that Sunday morning was Daylight Savings unless one of us was clued in enough to realize that the computers had magically updated themselves overnight. And what is worse, unlike earlier versions of Windows, Windows XP cannot even be bothered to give me that nice little message box telling me that my computer time was updated.

On the plus side, this meant we ended up getting up an hour earlier than planned, and thus had enough time to drive into Davis and have our weekend waffle breakfast Sunday morning before heading off to choir practice. On the down side, this whole Daylight Savings thing really screws up our internal clocks, because by 5pm we were both starving and by 8:30 I was ready to crawl into bed and call it a day. This was not helped by the fact that we went to dinner with my mom to a new restaurant in Davis and ended up eating far too much (especially of the desserts), and while we did try to walk it off afterwards by meandering around Borders (where my mom procured my older sister’s anniversary present and if she is reading this, may I just point out right now that mom has really outdone herself with this one. And I’m not laughing hysterically as I write this at all, nosirree), by the time we got home I was still too full from dinner and went and curled up on the bed waiting for the sheets to finish going through the dryer, too sleepy to care that the still-slightly-radioactive cat had settled on my head and was slowly cooking my brain.

It’s been a quiet weekend. Saturday we had a small donut binge while watching Bend it Like Beckham, and then we sorted through a few crates of things left over from our days in Benthic Creatures to finally get rid of it all, and dragged the recycling to the recycling center. We also made a trip to Costco, to wander the aisles eating samples for lunch and stock up on canned food. It was a worthwhile trip because we managed to score three Christmas presents, thereby dropping only minutely the number of items still remaining to be purchased before the holidays (and winter birthdays) are upon us.

We did not get around to hanging the curtains in the living room or the pictures in the dining room (sigh), but I am not too concerned, because there are still two more months before the end of the year when I promised myself that these things would be done. I did, however, sit down and crack a huge pile of walnuts – a task which resulted in my shredding my fingers on shell shards (And by the way, if there is some sort of technique to cracking walnuts so that the nut comes out in those perfect little halves that you can buy in the store, will someone please tell me? Please? Thank you).

I ended up with this huge pile of walnuts because my parents’ walnut tree is determined to provide enough walnuts each year to feed a small nation, and it is now the time of year when those with fruit or nut-bearing trees start foisting their extra produce on the rest of us (not, I should add, that I mind this one bit, because hey, free walnuts!). There are buckets of walnuts still at my parents’ house and this does not include the few tons of walnuts the gardeners scooped up and threw away the last time they mowed the backyard. I am eying the rather hefty bag of nut meats that is currently taking up a large portion of my freezer space and pondering how many loaves of nut bread I will need to bake in order to make any sort of sizeable dent in them. This is actually kind of nice, since autumn brings out my urge to bake. Even when the term ‘autumn’ has absolutely no relevance to the actual weather (in the 90’s today because, you know, it’s October and it’s not supposed to be *cooler* or anything. Sheesh).

A few months ago I had this bright idea of starting a photo journal, posting one picture per entry, with the goal of one entry per day. I’ve been intrigued by some of the other photo journals I’ve found online, and since both Richard and I now have digital cameras and the ability to snap pictures at a moment’s notice, I didn’t think it would be too difficult to keep going.

I am discovering that it is far more difficult than I had previously imagined. I look at other sites and see beautiful or interesting snapshots that span the range from wild and bizarre to ordinary and every day items. Obviously finding things to take pictures of is not difficult at all for everyone else who has tried this. So why is it so difficult for me?

I know that one reason is that I am continually looking for something special – some great photographic moment – and that half the time I do not have my camera actually in my hand when I see something that might be worth capturing, or else by the time I fumble it out of my purse the moment has passed. And don’t get me wrong – I’m actually pretty proud of a few of the pictures I’ve taken since we started this project, especially since I know I would never have thought to drag out the camera without such a motive. What I have such a hard time with is the notion that every picture does not have to be the perfect moment (And also, there’s the little matter of the fact that no one would ever accuse me of being any kind of great photographer). We’re still plugging away at it, however, if only because it *is* kind of fun, in a slightly frantic sort of way. And if nothing else it is forcing me to pay attention to things around me – something that’s probably a nice change for someone who often defines the word ‘oblivious’ a little too well.

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We had an interesting discussion last night at the bible study. I noted before that this week was all about law and order and how it is laid out in the bible (if you want some fun, go poke through Deuteronomy and check out all the nitpicky little laws. My personal favorite is the one about how if two men get in a fight and the wife of one grabs the balls of the other, she gets her hand cut off. But anyway, the subject came up, as it inevitably does in these sort of situations, about people who do not believe in god but claim that they still are spiritual, and the natural question is, of course, how is this possible? As the token agnostic in the group, naturally I felt it my duty to at least attempt to offer some insight into how the rest of us wackos think, so after fumbling around and pondering it for a while I finally hit on an explanation that at least makes sense to me. Being spiritual does not require a belief in a supreme being. I believe that there are other powers out there that may not be visible to the human eye. I believe that people can interact with those powers to some extent, and that those powers can have an impact on what goes on around us – whether it be our own lives or our environment. What I have a hard time believing, however, is that there is one, central power that is supreme over everything else; that has ultimate power over me and every living creature and that is guiding my fate. That is, for me, the distinct difference between spirituality and belief in a god.

It seemed to make sense to the rest of the group (once I finally figured out how to put the whole concept into words), but I’m curious if I’m just some weirdly abnormal agnostic or if this is the general perspective of other people who are in my position. Not knowing very many other agnostics, I can’t take any sort of informal poll, however. So I guess it will just have to do.

In other, less weighty news, Rebecca is home. The vet said she hadn’t made a peep the entire time she was there, but the minute they opened the door to bring her out I could hear her yelling, and she did not stop yelling for more than the time it took her to suck in a breath the entire drive home. And people wonder why it is that house call vets are worth their weight in gold…

So far, she seems to be doing fine. The only thing remaining is to keep her shut up at night for the next two weeks because she’s not allowed to sleep with us because she is still slightly radioactive. Why yes, this does makes me giggle like an idiot every time I say this, just so you know. And the plus side of this is that it’s a great incentive to get out of bed in the morning, because as soon as the alarm goes off, she knows I am awake and starts yelling. So much for my usual habit of smacking the snooze alarm at least once and rolling over to get a few more minutes of sleep. I could be wildly optimistic and say that two weeks of hopping out of bed at the first sound of the alarm might cure me of the snooze button habit, but I think we all know better than that.