There is this recurring daydream I have been having lately. In it, Richard and I run off for a lovely trip somewhere. The location really doesn’t matter because it’s not the destination, it’s the fact that when we come back home, everything in the house is done. Someone else made all the decisions about what type of wood to use for built in shelving, and what sort of curtains would look best in each room, and where all the random stuff could be put away. Someone else went through all the miscellaneous furniture and stuff and figured out what should be donated and what can still work in this new space, and someone else finished off the baseboards around the doors downstairs, and designed the new kitchen and landscaped the front and back yards.

Ah well. Back to reality. I’ve been having a little email chat with my dad and my brother-in-law regarding the wood for that built-in shelving, and I swear I am this close to just tossing my hands up and insisting we just go with painted instead of stained, because it would be so much easier. There is a huge stack of books on kitchen design from the library, sitting by my chair at the dining room table, and more are on their way. And I am doing my best to just ignore the boxes that still wait to be unpacked, and the stack of stuff needing to be donated that’s taking up half the front hall. It will all be dealt with eventually. Some day.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

I think the world was trying to make up for the lack of traffic on Monday (due to it being a holiday), and decided that every single car in Sacramento needed to be on the freeway, attempting to go the exact same direction I was going this morning. Ugh. I am so glad that the length of my trip that’s on the freeway is so short, because it was a wee bit insane.

When we woke up this morning the house still smelled delightfully of pumpkin and spice, so it seemed only natural that breakfast was some of the pumpkin brownies. I cut up the rest of the pan and divided it onto two plates, one for each of our respective offices, because I think if these things stay in the house one moment longer we will simply eat the entire pan. Of course it does not help that Richard forgot to take his plate in to his office today, so there were still brownies sitting there temptingly on the kitchen counter when I got home.

I’d intended to make another batch or two of pumpkin bread for the holiday bazaar, but by the time I got home I was tired and headachey. Richard wasn’t feeling too good either – he’s got all the signs of a cold coming on, which means, for someone with asthma as severe as he has it, things can get rough. So instead of baking, we both crashed for a nap, and didn’t have time for dinner before we had to run off to the play. I am happy to report that pumpkin brownies make just as tasty a dinner as they do a breakfast.

I left Richard home, wheezily clutching his nebulizer, and headed off to the UC Davis campus to meet my parents for the play – Noises Off. This is the first time I’ve actually seen this in ‘real’ play format – my only other exposure was the movie version starring Christopher Reeve, John Ritter, Michael Caine, and Carol Burnett. I remember seeing this for the first time, back in college. The first act seems so very slow, but the second act really picks up and by the end you would have to be dead not to be laughing. The play at UC Davis was very well done and I am sorry Richard had to miss it, but glad that my parents stumbled across the listing and sent us the link and that we got the tickets just in time.

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At some point yesterday I realized that the church holiday bazaar is this coming weekend and I have done no baking for it (and since my knitting mom signed me up to make stuff, I needed to get busy). So when I got home this afternoon from work, I headed immediately into the kitchen, pulled all my stockpiled cans of pumpkin out of the cupboard, and commenced with the baking.

First on the list was a batch of Pumpkin Brownies. I found this recipe online a week or so ago and bookmarked it to try. They’re a moist pumpkin cake, with a sprinkling of chocolate chips. I was a little unsure at first, since it only calls for half a cup of chips and that seemed awfully light on the chocolate, but I stuck to the recipe and I’m really glad I didn’t go on my first instinct, which was to add more. Half a cup provides just enough chocolate to go around – more would overwhelm these.

The original plan had been to make these for the bazaar, but then we started nibbling on them, and I suspect there won’t be enough left from the pan after we send brownies off to both our offices tomorrow, to donate. These are seriously delicious, and also a wee bit addictive. The good news is that I’ve got lots of pumpkin (and chocolate chips) left so I can make another batch.

After the brownies were out of the oven I stirred together the first batch of Pumpkin Bread. This is a staple at any Thanksgiving or Christmas gathering for my family, and it’s been a hit at the church bake sale for a number of years, so I always try to make a whole pile of it. One batch makes two dense loaves, so while Richard was putting dinner together, I stirred up the second batch, so throughout the rest of the evening the house has been smelling deliciously like pumpkin and spices and warm baking things.

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It’s been a Monday sort of Monday, most of the day. Richard had the day off, since today is Veterans Day, and his workplace considers it a non-working holiday. So I got up and headed off to work and left him still in bed, while I wished I could have stayed home in bed too. It didn’t help that, when I walked into the office, I was the only one there, and spent the next few hours (until someone else finally showed up) wondering if maybe they’d just forgotten to send me the memo about how everyone else decided to just take the day off without me.

I was looking forward to today because this morning was when registration opened for retreat I really wanted to go to. Unfortunately, there were problems with the registration system, and by the time they got it back online and had sorted everything out for those lucky few who’d managed to get in anyway, every single class I had been interested in was full. I don’t fault the organizers – they had a big mess to clean up this morning when the system ground to a halt, and it surely did not help that some of them had to deal with losing power in the middle as well – but it was just frustrating to have been looking forward to something that apparently just wasn’t meant to be.

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Even though we were up far too late last night (Richard was writing; I was playing games on the computer because I am an idiot and apparently incapable of remembering that I can no longer drink caffeinated coffee after lunchtime – sigh), I still woke up early this morning. And once I looked outside and saw how lovely a day it was, I then decided I had to share it with someone, so I poked at Richard until he got out of bed and we went off to the little local bagel place for breakfast. I had a pumpkin spice bagel there, and I am quite sad that this is likely a seasonal item because I think I could cheerfully eat those every weekend for the rest of my life.

Richard’s parents called yesterday to say that they were going to be heading up to Placerville and since our house is conveniently located along the way, did we want to do lunch. So they showed up around 1pm, and we headed off to lunch and spent several hours eating and talking and laughing and catching up on the goings on in his family. His mom has been to the house since we moved in, but his dad hadn’t been to see the place since we were in the early stages of floor-laying-hell, so we gave them a tour of the progress to date. I am looking forward to the day when we can give someone a tour of the house without feeling as if I have to include the list of ‘well, someday those boxes will be gone and that piece of furniture will be moved over there, and we’re going to have this thing built / installed / fixed’.

Other than the visit from Richard’s parents, it’s been a fairly quiet and lazy day. Richard went off to a writer’s group this afternoon and I stayed home and alternated between knitting and reading and watching the occasional really stupid TV show. It’s been frustrating, having to scale back on the time I spend knitting, but I really overdid it on Friday, to the point where my stupid elbow was seriously throbbing most of Friday night, and if this thing is ever going to heal I have to not let that sort of thing happen again.

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Today has been a gray and dreary sort of day. When we woke up and looked outside the ground was wet (a point that induced a wee bit of eye rolling on my part because it was just yesterday I finally broke down and watered the yard since we’d had several weeks of clear and dry). So as we both sat at the table and ate Chocolate Multigrain Muffins for breakfast (they are extremely filling, so one batch lasts a long time for two people), Richard noted that he was going to pass on going to the writer’s group meeting normally scheduled for today and I pondered what I might get done today, and then we both remembered that hey, we haven’t been up to Apple Hill yet this year.

So Richard poked at his Nanowrimo novel for an hour or so and I poked at my computer and also at the cats, and then, just about the time we were both starting to feel ready for lunch, we hopped into the car and drove up Highway 50 to Apple Hill. Because there is nothing quite like having fresh-from-the-oven apple pie topped with vanilla ice cream and cider sauce for lunch.

Except it turns out the place we normally get our pie (it’s an individual pie they call a Walkin’ Pie, and it’s basically this sphere of dough-wrapped pie filling and it is awesome) had run out of the already baked pies and were in the process of making more, but it was going to be a while before they were cooked. So…there is nothing quite like having a sample plate of apple cheesecake, apple crisp, and french apple pie topped with ice cream and cider sauce for lunch! Which is exactly what we did (and we were very glad we decided to split just one because it was more than enough). It was drizzling and the pie place was crowded so we sat in the car and each held onto one edge of the plate and ate very awkwardly so as to minimize the spilling of sticky cider sauce and apple goo down our shirts. This was mostly successful. Ah well. As for those Walkin’ Pies, it turns out they sell them frozen, with instructions for how to thaw and bake one for yourself. They also sell their incredible cider sauce. So it’s entirely possible that there are now four overstuffed spheres of pie in our freezer and a jar of dark, rich cider sauce in the pantry, for later. Yum.

We headed back home after stopping at another farm to pick up caramel apples and cinnamon apple jelly and a small bag of fresh picked apples for later snacking. And that’s about it for the day. By the time we made it back home it has started to pour, so we slipped and slid back in the door and Richard returned to his writing while I sat down on the couch with an afghan and several cats and read the afternoon and evening away. We ate the caramel apples after dinner, for dessert, and now I am pleasantly full of apples and caramel and cinnamon and dough, and listening to the rain outside and very happy with the day.

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One of the side effects of having cats – especially indoor-only cats – is having to deal with the litter box. Houses usually are not built with special ventilated rooms to accommodate these things, and if you’ve got only one or two cats you can maybe get away with stuffing a box back behind the toilet and hoping air fresheners will do the trick. But we’ve got six cats and we’ve got three very large litter boxes (they are actually not litter boxes at all, but large high-sided plastic storage bins, and they work great) and the best place to stash those boxes in this house is the laundry room. It’s tiled, for one thing, and narrow, but with a space that was the perfect size for setting big boxes side by side, out of the way. Richard installed a cat door a few months ago, and that’s helped cut down on how far they can fling the litter (I have come to the conclusion that there is no litter box ever invented from which a determined cat cannot find *some* way to ‘help’ the litter escape), but there’s been one issue remaining. The smell. Regular scooping and cleaning helps keep it down to a minimum but the way the house is laid out, the laundry room is right next to the stairs, and, well, heat rises, and that creates a natural pull of air up those stairs, carrying with it a faint bouquet of eu de cattery.

So we got to thinking. The problem here is that air from the laundry room is moving back into the rest of the house. Seems like the best way to fix that problem is create a situation where air is being pulled *into* the laundry room *from* the house (it turns out high school physics was good for something after all!). And the most logical way to accomplish that was to have an exhaust fan installed in the laundry room. So one of the things high on our list of stuff for our contractor to get done, now that we no longer have the old house to worry about and can focus on the ‘new’ one, was to get that fan installed ASAP.

We keep forgetting about one of the most exciting parts about living in a nearly 100 year old house. It’s full of surprises. The contractor came over this morning, fan and tools in tow, and after we exchanged pleasantries, he headed downstairs and got to work. He pulled out his trusty stud finder and figured out where would be the best place to situate the exhaust fan and its vent, and very carefully measured and cut a nice big hole in the ceiling to accommodate it, and if this was a newer house, having never been raised several feet off its foundation to turn a basement into a full first story, this might have been no problem at all. But as he discovered, when they raised the second story, they added a ceiling for the first story. The studs for the kitchen, which is right over the laundry room, run one direction. The new ceiling, whose studs he was registering on his stud finder, has studs that run the opposite direction. Threading any sort of venting between those two layers (and fighting past a rather impressive spiderweb of piping and wires that come from a house that’s had lots of changes over the years) was just not going to happen.

The good news is that eventually he figured out a new place to work in the venting, even if it took a lot longer than he’d anticipated (what with having to work around two sets of studs) and we have our exhaust fan. It vents continuously. There is no switch to turn it on or off. As he noted, the engine in this thing is pretty basic, so if at some point it wears out, it’ll be a snap to just pop out the old one and pop in a replacement. You can hear a faint hum if you’re standing at the top of the stairs, and it’s also faintly audible when you’re in the downstairs guest room, but it’s the sort of noise that is very easy to ignore. And the very best part is that it works, exactly as we had hoped. One more important task off the long list. Phew.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

As I was sitting, this afternoon, through a very lengthy meeting at work, my mind naturally started drifting (it doesn’t help that our conference room is flanked by huge windows and thus gets really warm during the day. And it occurred to me that there was this election earlier this week, for which we received no voting materials at all. Both of us are registered as permanent absentee, so normally we get all this stuff in the mail, but apparently this kind of thing does not get forwarded when you move out of county.

It also occurred to me that after five months in the new place, it might be wise to finally get around to getting the (mandatory) parking passes for our neighborhood. It’s not like we’ve been in any danger of getting ticketed so far, but there is only so long one should tempt fate, and besides, the silly things are free, so the only thing standing in the way is the requirement that we provide a copy of the registration for the car being stickered, and that car must be registered to the new address. Richard’s was easy – his car came up for renewal at the beginning of this month so when the new registration info arrives, he’ll have the correct address and can get the pass for his car. But mine was renewed before we moved, and for some reason it did not occur to me to update the address back then, so I either have the choice of waiting til next year and hoping that no bored little parking patrol person decides to trundle down our street in the meantime, or suck it up and deal with it.

Luckily, with the power of that nifty thing called the internet, most of this can be dealt with online. I registered to vote in our new county with a click of a button, refraining, as usual, to select a party because we get enough election spam as it is without admitting that we might actually *prefer* one over the others. Unfortunately the DMV’s online address change system refuses to recognize my vehicle ID, so I had to print it out and take care of it the old fashioned way (filling out a form, and actually dredging up a stamp and putting it in the *mail*.)

So…two more things checked off the (very lengthy) list of stuff I need to do after the move, and if I know Murphy’s Law, it should be only a matter of time before I get called for jury duty. And in the meantime I will cross my fingers that I can get the new registration for the car back in the mail in time to get myself that silly little parking pass before our luck runs out.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

In a few months, my office is moving. This has been in the works for over a year now, as the higher ups pondered property after property, weighing the issues of being further downtown (and thus making everyone’s commute that much more ugly, with the bonus that everyone would also have to pay for parking), or finding a place near where we already are, but with the nicer, corporate feel the guys on the top were looking for. Our office is currently located in a rather eclectic little building that sits right on the river. The interior is a bit funky, with huge windows and tons of natural light and gorgeous river views, and big sloped roofs and exposed beams, and it’s definitely more casual than every other office this company has, but we’re a small, funky, eclectic group here in Sacramento and so our casual little office has worked out fairly well for us so far.

But the lease is coming up, and the word came down from on high, and so, we’re moving. Luckily, however, we’ll still be in a building that’s right on the river, with lots of windows and tons of natural light and gorgeous views, easy to get to from the freeway (we all come from different directions so this is a big must), and best of all, it is not downtown, with all the traffic and issues of paying for parking. Hurrah.

Last week we all got to troop over and check out the new space. The beauty of having such a small office is that everyone got to give their input in color schemes for carpet and paint, and how best to lay out the kitchen / copy room, and where we would prefer to have our desks set up, and so on. I am a little bit giddy because the research department (all whopping two of us) will have a room with an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, so I am going to go from never having anywhere to put things, to suddenly having more shelves than we could possibly need.

Even though we are not going to be moving until the end of January or early February, in preparation for the move the office head has been doing a rather massive cleaning sweep. Every morning this week when we come in there is more stuff piled up near the front door (the usual repository for “stuff that needs to go to the trash”, and more and more little sticky notes appear on boxes and file cabinets throughout the office, indicating what’s been sorted and cleaned out, and what still remains. This afternoon, we took the first load of stuff to the dumpster, and it is sort of terrifying to realize that even after filling up the back of a truck and carrying stacks of boxes away, the pile of stuff to get rid of doesn’t look any smaller at all. I suspect we’ll be carting loads of stuff to the dumpster on a daily basis for the rest of the week, at this rate, just as I also suspect that there is plenty more to add to the pile as well.

It’s fun, though, in a way. Maybe it’s because I moved so much as a kid (the price of being a military brat), but I enjoy this part of moving. There is something so very refreshing about purging away all the clutter that tends to accumulate when you’ve been in a place for years, and it’s only when you move that there’s ever the incentive to do it (the more you get rid of, after all, the less you have to take with you).

Anyway. On a completely different note, we are slowly settling back into the swing of home cooking. After all, what’s the point in doing all this freezer stocking if we keep forgetting to take something out to thaw? So tonight for dinner I put together a batch of Black Bean and Cheese Quesadillas while Richard washed dishes (a rapid accumulation of dishes is the definite downside to home cooking), and there is a batch of Chocolate Multigrain Muffins cooling on the kitchen counter, making the whole house smell divine.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

It hit me today, all of a sudden, how quickly we are coming up on Christmas; this was followed immediately by the realization that there is still an awful lot of work I want done to the house by then. If it was any other Christmas I might not be so anxious, but in my family we rotate who hosts, and this year it’s my turn, and I would like the house to be in slightly better shape before my entire family descends on our doorstep.

Luckily the contractor called me this morning, with good news about our options for installing some sort of exhaust fan in the laundry room / litter box room, so he and Richard set up a day for him to come over (and Richard to work from home so he can be there to let the guy in, and herd the cats if necessary). He figures it’ll take about a day to tackle a lot of the little items we wanted taken care of, plus while he’s there we can also talk about some of the larger projects – repairing and replacing the back deck, and building and installing the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves we want for two walls of the round room downstairs.

Of course, we can’t have the contractor start working on either big project until we make some decisions of our own. The current back deck is covered with some kind of heavy duty linoleum in a truly hideous faux stone pattern – that has to go, mainly because the wood underneath is rotting through. And while we’d love to replace the entire deck platform with something solid, so the area underneath stays dry, there’s just not very many options out there that either don’t involve more ugly linoleum, or aren’t insanely expensive. So we’re going to go with just the basic treated redwood decking.

The other decision to make focused on the library shelving – whether or not to paint the shelves or stain them (it makes a difference in the type of wood he will use). Ultimately we decided we both would prefer stained, even if it’s a little bit more expensive. So this evening Richard and I headed off to Home Depot to pick out our favorite stain colors (and make a decision on the type of wood to use). Amusingly, the entire focus of this little room is being based solely around how the colors and the woods will work with the colors and style of a picture we both love, that’s been framed and waiting to be hung in our someday library for several years. But all of this does mean that if I want the contractor to get those shelves built and installed (with all the accompanying molding and trim), I first need to get in there and finally prime and paint the walls which have been bare and ugly since we ripped off all the old wallpaper weeks ago.

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