I unpacked the rest of the boxes of breakable stuff today. Now that the china cabinet has been moved into the guest room upstairs (it cannot go into the dining room because the dining room walls are lined with plate racks that are lower than the china cabinet is high, and we are not willing to yank those off the wall for a piece of furniture that is only ever used for display purposes anyway), I could finally unpack all the candles and candlesticks, and all the remaining teacups and saucers and plates and things that have been languishing in boxes since May. I’d used most of our cloth napkins and table runners to wrap the breakables in, so this endeavor means that after they’ve all been run through the wash, we’ll have cloth napkins available once more.

There were not enough cloth napkins to wrap everything, of course, so unpacking produced a small mountain of slightly wadded newspaper. During the unpacking process, I just tossed it onto the floor, intending to gather it all up later (along with the empty boxes) and take it out to the recycling bin. But the cats had other plans and have spent the day randomly sauntering into the guest room and then pouncing on the paper, or diving underneath the paper, or falling asleep amid the paper – in other words, neither of us had the heart to remove all the paper, not when the cats still find it so entertaining.

Richard washed a sink full of dishes and vacuumed the floor, and I made a pan of pumpkin brownies and scrubbed down the kitchen counters and the toilets, and between the two of us we managed to cross a few more things off that list by early afternoon, and by then it was too late to care about any of the others, because there was a knock on the door and my knitting group showed up, needles and yarn in hand, and we proceeded to assemble all the squares everyone’s been knitting into something resembling a baby blanket. Or rather, they assembled, and I knit frantically, since there were extra squares needed beyond what had already been made, and by the time they were done, I’d whipped out two and had made it halfway through a third, and the blanket was as assembled as it could be with missing the few remaining squares, and it’ll be up to me to finish them all off.

It was fun to have them all over. Richard’s had friends and Nanowrimo people over, and we’ve had our families, but this is the first time any of my friends (aside from my knitting mom) have seen the new house. We all sat around the table and chatted, and Rosemary and Tangerine wove around our feet and occasionally tried to steal yarn, and it was a lot of fun.

Then Richard headed off to another Nanowrimo gathering, leaving me to fend for myself for dinner, and all the knitters headed off towards home, except for my knitting mom who didn’t have dinner plans either. So we went to 33rd Street Cafe and she had butternut and apple soup which was surprisingly good for something so predominantly squash, and I had a wild mushroom and goat cheese pizza and even though I admit to being tempted by the vanilla bean creme brulee that was listed on the menu, we virtuously passed on dessert (well, it would have been virtuous except for the fact that she had apple pie at home, and I still had pumpkin brownies).

I managed to finish off two more squares for the baby blanket before Richard got home, and was apparently so engrossed in my knitting that I failed to realize some cat had run off with a ball of yarn and had had a merry time with it all over the living room. I discovered this only after Richard walked in the door and paused, staring at the floor, before laughing and following the trail of yarn as it wove from room to room. I suspect Azzie was the likely culprit, since he’s done this before, but he was curled up on Richard’s chair in the office, fast asleep.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

When I woke up this morning, after doing the usual petting of the cats and scooping of the litter boxes and checking of the email, I sat down with a big yellow notepad and filled one entire sheet with a To Do list. I divided it into sections, by room of the house, with a big “Other” category at the end. One big sheet of everything I want to accomplish this weekend.

(I love lists. I love making lists – especially To Do lists – and I love checking things off on lists. I’ve tried various computer-based lists, but they just don’t give me the satisfaction of physically checking off each item with a pencil or pen, and seeing a big long sheet of paper full of things slowly get crossed off one by one. I come from a long line of list makers and my sisters and I have happily carried on the tradition of paper lists we learned from our mom.)

Over the course of the day we’ve managed to do quite a lot of things on the list. I went to the library and turned in a pile of books and picked up a pile more. We moved the china cabinet into the upstairs guest room. Richard went off to Fry’s and picked up some extra cables and clips, and strung the cable across the top of the door between living room and dining room for the television (the previous owner had cable hook-ups in every room of the house except the living room, the walls are plaster, and I’m not ready to go drilling holes into them until I’m absolutely positively certain I like where the television ends up). I unpacked a few more boxes and rearranged a few more. We decluttered the living room and dining room. And now that Richard’s on antibiotics for his latest bout of respiratory infection, he was up to going out, so we rode our bikes back to the bike shop to get the new fenders and odometers installed.

While we were off taking care of the bikes, we had about an hour to kill until they’d be ready, so we walked a few blocks down the road and got some coffee and tea and bagels at a little hippy coffee shop. We had just enough time to skim through the local left-wing free newspaper (always a source of endless amusement for the personal ads alone), and then decided to walk around the other side of the block on our way back, which is when I saw the Antiques sign and said ‘hey, want to go check out that store?’.

The first one was a store full of ‘mid-century antiques’, and maybe this speaks to my age, but when did stuff from the 60’s and 70’s become antiques? Yeesh. The second store, however, was more my type of antique store. The aisles are so crowded you’re half afraid you’re going to knock something over, and there are treasures lurking everywhere, even hanging from the ceiling. Huge pieces of furniture were tucked in between chairs and shelves of glassware; old watering cans and toys hung from the ceiling, and there was an entire section in the back full of old cookbooks that I’d have loved to browse through if we’d had more time. As it was, we found a standing mirror in a wooden frame that we really liked, and they agreed to let us pay for it and come back to get it once we had a car. So we picked up our bikes and rode back home, and then hopped in the car and drove back down to pick up our mirror, which is now standing in the bedroom downstairs, just where we needed one.

Richard is off to another Nanowrimo write-in, so I’m home with the cats and my knitting, and my pile of books. I’ve already made it through three of them (including the latest offering in the Dexter series, which was a bit of a disappointment compared to the previous two). And I think it’s time to go forage in the kitchen for dinner before settling back in with another book, or else eventually making my way downstairs and going to bed.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

It was quite a nice Thanksgiving. The traffic, once we got past Vacaville, was negligible, and despite getting a bit of a late start (due to a very chatty neighbor), we made it to Richard’s parents’ house only a little later than we’d planned. We all walked to a local Subway for lunch, then back home to knit and write and chat with family before the rest of the dinner guests showed up. The turkey was actually cooked by dinner time (two years ago, it finally finished up at around 10 or 11 at night, so our Thanksgiving dinner consisted mainly of sides), and there was, as usual, more than enough food crowded onto the table. We all ate so much that by the time Richard’s mom pulled out the desserts – brownies with peppermint frosting and a pumpkin apple cobbler – it was almost painful to eat any more.

Richard’s dad got up early this morning since he wanted to pick up a few things at the Black Friday sales, but the rest of us decided there was nothing we wanted badly enough to make it out to the shops that early (some of the stores were opening at 4am – insane!), so we all slept in a few hours later. Or rather, most everyone did – I never sleep well in strange places, so after tossing and turning for hours, I finally gave up and came out at about 5:30 and got in a few hours of knitting before the rest of the house woke up.

We all headed off for the traditional post-Thanksgiving breakfast, where we were joined by Richard’s sister and niece, and then from there went off to do the traditional post-Thanksgiving ornament purchase. Back to the house to drink more coffee, and then it was off to the local theater, to see Enchanted. It is a thoroughly delightful and entertaining film. Amy Adams was absolutely perfect as the princess, and the guy playing the prince had that perfect combination of cluelessness, arrogance, and charm that is typical of the Disney cartoon prince.

Dinner was Thanksgiving leftovers, of course, and we all stuffed ourselves silly again because it was all so good. Then we took peppermint covered brownies for the road, and packed up the car, and Richard and I headed back onto the freeway for the long drive home, where we were greeted by six cats, and a small flood in the laundry room. Seems the hoses on the washing machine are leaking. Luckily the floor is tiled there, including the baseboard, and I did note to Richard that I’d been meaning to mop in there anyway (although I could have done it without quite *that* much water on the floor), so once we cleaned it up, and discovered the source of the water, and turned off the taps, it was fine.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how lucky I am. It is always easier to look at the things I wish could still be improved, or be fixed, or just get better in general, and it’s not always as easy to look back at all the things that are already just what I wanted, or needed, them to be.We have a beautiful house that we love, in a neighborhood we adore. We both have jobs we like very much, that provide good wages and terrific benefits. We are, for the most part, healthy. The cats are healthy. We’ve both got hobbies that we love and that we are also very good at, and groups of friends to hang out with, and piles of books to read when we want to just stay in. Our families are all doing pretty good – in health and in life – when compared to most, and all in all, it’s pretty hard to complain.

As I am typing this, I’m sitting in a chair with a purring cat on my lap. Outside, there are squirrels chittering in the trees and the sun is shining brightly, filtering down through the leaves that still remain overhead. As soon as I’m done posting this, I’ll go take a shower and then get dressed and put together the green bean casserole we were asked to bring for dinner. We’ll put out extra food and water for the cats and make sure the litter boxes are scooped, and leave blankets lying out on couches and beds and chairs so they’ve got places to cuddle up in little nests if they want, and then we’ll head down to Richard’s parents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s never quite the same as having Thanksgiving with my own family, but that’s never the same now anyway, now that my sisters and I are grown and have families of our own, and there are various dietary restrictions in place that weren’t there when we were young. But things change, even traditions, and sometimes I just have to remember to remind myself that I am lucky; that we are lucky, and for everything we have and everyone we love, I give thanks.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

It was a slow day at the office – so slow that at one point I took a very quick break and zipped onto Amazon to order a birthday present for my brother-in-law. I have to admit I have a deep and abiding love for Amazon.com – the fact that I can order an item, have it shipped directly to the recipient, gift wrapped and with a little note, all from the comfort of my own chair, is awesome. There’s been this talk on the forum I frequent about feeling as if we are maybe living in the future. We may not yet have flying cars or teleportation, but we at least have comprehensive online shopping that provides the ultimate holiday gift – complete avoidance of having to step foot inside any sort of shopping mall.

Anyway. It’s been fairly uneventful, as far as days go. We did an office lunch – can never go wrong with Chinese food for that – and as info from other offices came trickling in, indicating that they were all officially shutting down at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, our tiny little office shrugged its collective shoulders and decided we’d join the trend.

Richard and I went out for dinner, and stopped by the grocery store on the way home. I’d been hoping that by going later in the evening it wouldn’t be too crowded, but it’s the night before Thanksgiving and I suspect there is no time that will not be crowded, until they finally close their doors at some point tomorrow afternoon and leave any last minute shoppers stranded. Their tough luck.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

Before I go into today’s story, an update. Either the critter Rosie’s been tracking has moved on, or else she’s finally realized that we’re simply not going to fall for her version of Extreme Made-You-Look, but there’s been no more lurking and staring at the dishwasher since last night. I figure it’ll be soon enough we’ll be yanking that dishwasher out (along with every other item in that kitchen) in preparation for the grand remodel early next year, so we’ll find out what her fuss was about sooner or later.

But back to today. I got laser surgery done on my left eye probably nine or ten years ago (the fact that I cannot find reference to having the surgery in my archives lets me know it’s been since before 2000; other than that, who knows). The left eye was brought from 20/200 up to 20/20; the right eye they didn’t touch because it’s been 20/40 all along and since that’s driving legal in the state of California, they didn’t want to mess with it and possibly make it worse.

Well, the past year or so I’ve noticed it’s been slowly getting harder to read street signs (and that sort of excitement is the kind I could live without when I’m driving), and I’m having to squint to read stuff that’s far away, and while I could put it down to eye strain from spending about 8 hours a day in front of a computer (or else in front of a book, or in front of some knitting) , and, well, let’s face it. I’m two years away from turning 40, and vision’s one of the first things to start to slip. Except, of course, that when you get older you’re supposed to get more far-sighted, and my problem seems to be slipping back into near-sighted, so maybe once I hit that magical ‘older’ point, the eyes will finally adjust to normal, for once in my life.

I went to an optometrist today. She did all manner of tests and shining of lights and poking and prodding and then she put a lens in front of each eye and said ‘how’s that?’ and what do you know, all those letters on the vision chart that were so blurry were suddenly actually distinguishable from each other.

So basically it turns out that my left eye decided that it was tired of being always different, and has now joined the right eye, and I’ve got a matched set of 20/40 eyeballs. Where before I used to be able to just adjust to distances and such, depending on what I needed to see, and which eye would work best for that sort of vision, now both eyes are just about the same, and that self-adjusting doesn’t work so well anymore. Who knew such a tiny little deficiency could be such a huge pain in the tail?

I picked out a pair of glasses, because to be perfectly honest I am just not interested in going back to contacts and all that those entail. Neither eye is bad enough to try for laser surgery again. And for close up stuff I can still probably get away with no glasses at all. But for driving, and distance stuff, and seeing things in lower levels of light (like, say, reading music for a concert in which I am singing, in poor lighting – wouldn’t *that* be useful), the glasses will come in quite handy.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

1. The verdict on the pie – delicious. Or at least everyone in my office seemed to like it. One coworker noted that it’s as if the mouth can’t figure out what it is – is it chocolate? Is it pumpkin? I simply noted that here is a pumpkin pie I can finally eat, even if it does have to be in very, very teeny pieces (even with the chocolate there is only so much squishiness I can stand in a food).

2. This evening Rosie resumed her staring position right in front of the dishwasher. The rational part of my brain me thinks maybe we ought to pull it out and see what’s back there. the rest of my brain is currently telling the rational part to shut up and go away.

3. I hate my sinuses. Richard hates his lungs. We are having a lovely organ-hating pity party together this week.

4. Why is it that if a cat can be trained to use piddle and poop in a litter box, they cannot also be convinced to yark hairballs in a litter receptacle as well? Seriously. Ick.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

It being nearly Thanksgiving, and thus nearly time for all the Thanksgiving food, it’s time for me to admit that there is one classic Thanksgiving dish I cannot stand. Pumpkin pie. I like pumpkin just fine when it’s in other things (bread, scones, brownies with chocolate chips swirled in), but in a pie, it’s just wrong. I can stomach about one or two small bites if I must, but the texture – all squishy and squirmy – just doesn’t work for me.

However, when I saw this recipe for Chocolate Pumpkin Pie, I was intrigued despite my usual pumpkin pie aversion. After all, there are few desserts that cannot be improved by the addition of chocolate, and the combination of pumpkin and chocolate has already proven to be quite delicious (the pumpkin brownies mentioned above would be one marvelous example of that). Plus, I have all that remaining canned pumpkin to use up, and I had all the other ingredients already in the cupboard, and best of all, I have two offices full of people to foist this on, since one of the key necessities of trying out a new recipe is to have a group of willing (or perhaps unsuspecting) people to consume it.

One of these will be accompanying Richard to work tomorrow; the other will come into my office with me.

They smell really good – a mix of chocolate and pumpkin and spice. Here’s hoping they taste as good as they smell.

********

On an entirely unrelated note, for the past hour or so Rosemary has been hunkered down in the kitchen, staring intently at the bottom of the dishwasher. Richard got down on his hands and knees with a flashlight and found nothing. We tried removing her. Either she is taking the oh-so-not-remotely-amusing-to-anyone-but-the-cats game of Made You Look one heck of a lot further than cats usually do, or there is some kind of critter lurking behind the dishwasher. I am sure I don’t have to say which option *I’m* fervently hoping is the right one. Shudder.

After making all that pumpkin bread, there was still most of a large can of pumpkin left in the fridge. So this morning I got up and made a double batch of pumpkin scones (which, sadly, did not use up all the pumpkin, as I hoped it would, so I suspect there might be more pumpkin brownies in our future). I made them small, so there’d be more of them, and we’ve been happily nibbling at them all day.

We went out for lunch and as we were sitting there, I noted that we still needed to get new bikes. So after lunch, off we headed to a bike store downtown. And about an hour later, I rode back home on my new bike, while Richard put his new bike in the back of the car and drove it home that way.

It felt good, being back on a bike. We used to go for long rides, and there were the few times I rode my bike the 30 miles to the office in the morning, but sickness and being busy and everything else just got in the way. When we moved we were looking forward to biking around Sacramento, exploring the areas around our neighborhood, but by the time we got to the point where every weekend wasn’t full of laying laminate flooring, or painting something, or fixing something, the old bikes had been swiped from the backyard, so we were reduced to waiting until it would be the right time to replace them.

Like last time, we both have the same model of bike, although his is a men’s and mine’s a woman’s model (I’m sorry, but I am far too clumsy to deal with that top bar that’s on a men’s bike, and yes, I *do* speak from experience). I am finding far too much amusement in the fact that mine is white and comes with a pattern of silvery leaves down the main bar. It’s probably for the best this model didn’t come in pink, because the amusement of a riding a flower-covered pink bike around town would have been too much for me to ignore.

We got racks installed, and lights, and we each bought some nice insulated panniers that come with rain covers, so we can carry groceries home (or perhaps knitting projects or laptops). There are fenders coming later, and I need to see if I still have my helmet and my riding gloves somewhere in one of the random boxes of stuff from the old house. Richard even got a little coffee cup holder to attach to the main bar, so as soon as the rest of the stuff comes in, we’ll be all set.

In the meantime, that little three mile ride home from the bike shop was lovely. And I am very much looking forward to Richard getting over his cold so we can start going out and doing more of that sort of thing. Now that we finally have bikes again.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

There’s been a number of little things on the ‘someday we need to buy’ list, for quite some time now. Some of them have been there since before we were even seriously discussing the whole ‘let’s sell the house and move to Sacramento’ idea that constituted the better part of this past spring and summer. Most of the things on that ‘someday’ list tend to be larger ticket items, but with a lot of bills to pay off, and then going through selling a house and buying a house and all the extra financial entanglements around those, it just never seemed like a good idea.

It’s such an odd feeling, now that this is all over. I’m so used to worrying about money. I’ve been doing it for so long that I’m not sure how not to worry about money. Spending money on some of those things we’ve been wanting for so long seemed somehow irresponsible, as if by doing that, we’d not have the money left to take care of stuff that *had* to be paid for.

We got an unexpected check today, from the company that once held our mortgage for the house we just sold. We’ve always had it set up so we paid a little extra each month, that went into a special escrow account that the mortgage holders kept to pay insurance and property taxes. Well, now that that house is sold and we’re no longer responsible for property taxes on that particular property, suddenly there was this pot of money they no longer needed to hold on to. So all of a sudden, it showed up. Ta da.

And it got us both to thinking. The move has been good for us in a lot of ways. Our commute time to our respective offices has been cut to less than half what it was. We’re closer to rehearsals and social groups, to grocery stores and restaurants and all the other amenities. We’re spending less on a lot of things, and there’s no longer those big bills hanging over our heads. Our savings are in great shape. Our investments are chugging merrily upward all on their own. And, well, there’s that list of stuff we someday wanted to buy. And it hit us. What are we waiting for? Someday might as well be today.

Luckily, being nerds, pretty much all the stuff on that someday list could be found in one location. And so we set off to the mecca of all things electronic – Fry’s. We walked down aisles. We pondered sizes and resolutions and space within rooms. We asked about compatibility with future technology. And then we paid and picked up our boxes (one for him, one for me, and a shiny new toy for both of us to share) and we came home and after unpacking and reading through directions and stuffing batteries in remotes, and hauling away the old clunker that’s been going slowly downhill for a year or more (the weirdly discolored patches in the middle of the screen were always so appealing) we sat down and ate dinner in front of our pretty new flat screen television.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.