So yesterday was not completely all about the Brain Monster hat. I’d set up the crockpot Saturday night with a batch of pumpkin butter and then just let it simmer all night. Sunday morning I felt like baking something for breakfast, and since there was just enough pumpkin left over in the fridge, I decided to use it up by making a batch of Pumpkin Cornmeal waffles. We had those for breakfast with a generous slathering of the pumpkin butter, and then I filled ten half-pint jars with what was left. If I can work in a batch of Apple Date Butter in the next few weeks, we’ll be set for scone and waffle topping for the next year.

Alas, the weekend is over now, and even Daylight Savings (finally!) can’t magically add more hours to the work days, even though it is definitely nicer to not have to get ready for work in the dark anymore. So it’s back to the usual – work during the day and, since it’s Monday, rehearsal tonight. The music we’re doing for our Christmas concert isn’t necessarily easier than what we’ve done in concerts past; it just tends to have these fiddly little bits that are catching a lot of us off guard from time to time. And when I got home, there were new episodes of Heroes and Journeyman to watch, both seriously awesome, especially Heroes, since not only did they actually wrap up several story lines (the writers of Lost could maybe take some notes here), they also confirmed a number of my speculations about plot and character.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

So what do you make for the computer nerd / RPG & board gamer guy for his 40th birthday?

A Brain Monster hat, of course. Complete with four sharp teeth and two large googly eyes.

Luckily he has a very twisted sense of humor and was willing to put it on and pose for pictures. Of course, don’t that pleasant grin fool you. I wasn’t the only one at his surprise party tonight that might be getting a little pay back later on (heh).

His wife organized a surprise party for him, and by all accounts it looked like she managed to completely pull it off. We all gathered in a back room at a local restaurant and brewery and mingled and chatted and nibbled and drank and did a lot of laughing, especially when the presents were being unwrapped.

I’m glad the hat went over well. It was made as a joke, just because I knew a brain-eating monster hat would appeal to his twisted sense of humor The fact that we ended the party by playing a few hands of “Zombie Fluxx” just underscores that point.

Anyway. Happy 40th birthday Jeff! Hope it’s a good one.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

There were chocolate croissants for breakfast this morning, compliments of Richard, who ran off to the bakery to pick them up while I was in the shower. There were much needed hair cuts (or in my case, simply a much needed bangs trim), and then we took a long, meandering drive through downtown Sacramento on the way home, exploring neighborhoods we hadn’t yet seen. We ate leftover pumpkin muffins for lunch (continuing the ‘healthy’ pastry theme – ha). And then Richard sat down to do some writing, and I headed off to Gold River to be part of the 1000 Knitters project, since the local knitting guild had so arranged for Franklin to come out to Sacramento for a photo shoot.

It was a lot of fun, and not just because of getting to meet Franklin and take part in the project, but because it was another reminder of how small a world this really is. I struck up a conversation with another knitter waiting for her photo session with Franklin, and as we chatted, we discovered we had several friends and interests in common. And as we were sitting there talking, another knitter just entering the room to take her own place in line stopped, looked at me, and said “Jenipurr?” Turns out it was someone I knew back in my online text-based Pern world RPG days. And if that wasn’t enough small world collision, as the three of us continued to talk, it turns out the two of them also had a lot of interests and people in common. So even though I was there for about two hours, time flew by, and by the time the first woman was called away for her shoot, we’d all exchanged Ravelry handles, and blog URL’s and it was all very awesome and fun.

By the time I got back home Richard was ready to take a break from writing, so he very nicely cleaned out the fridge (there were some scary things lurking in the back) and then plowed through another mountain of dishes while I worked on phase 2 of the weekend freezer-stocking plan – a double batch of Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas. We’ve made this twice before now and each time I’ve done some additional tweaking to the recipe, but I think this time it’s pretty much just how I wanted it to be. Because we both love these things so much, I cooked one batch right away, and stuffed the second batch into the freezer, and we curled up in the living room under blankets and cats and watched a movie and ate amazingly delicious enchiladas for dinner.

An after-dinner trip to the grocery store netted a whole assortment of new freezer-appropriate containers, because if we’re going to keep on doing this cook-for-two-weeks thing, plastic containers are a lot easier to wash, reuse, and store, than easily-punctured freezer bags. So as soon as I post this, I’m heading back to the kitchen to whip up a whole pile of bean and cheese wraps for future lunch entrees, or instead maybe I will just let the rest of the freezer stocking wait til tomorrow, and instead scrub out the crockpot and start working on a batch of pumpkin butter, because even though it looks pretty unlikely there will be any sort of jelly-making event this year (unlike years past, where friends and I have had varying levels of success with pomegranate jelly), that doesn’t mean I should let the season go by without canning at least something.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

(To any new readers coming over from NaBloPoMo – you can get a quick overview of who I am here)

Today was my Friday off, so I tried to sleep in for just a little bit after Richard got up to go to work, but the cats were having none of that. Ah well. So instead I got up and ate breakfast with Richard, and after he left for work I poked around on my computer for a bit, and then finally decided I ought to be at least slightly productive with my day. So I set up the crockpot to cook up a whole pile of chicken in preparation for this weekend’s cooking spree, and throughout the morning I alternated between tackling the mountain of dishes in the sink (oh, how we both miss having a functional dishwasher!) and putting together a double batch of quesadillas and tamale pie to stash in the freezer for the weeks ahead.

I had Richard help me put on the arm brace this morning, since I can’t pull it tight enough by myself (although I suspect if I really do have to wear this for months, I’ll eventually get the hang of it). I’ve noticed that it has to be fairly tight to be effective so that when I do silly things like pull a large pan of stuff out of the oven with my right hand (because I am right handed, darn it, and using my left hand to do this sort of thing is just not natural), I was still okay. But *because* it is so tight, I’m noticing that it’s impacting other things I do – namely knitting. Richard reminded me that if I was going to finish a certain secret project in time, I probably ought to start it ASAP. So I rummaged through the yarn closet (in dire need of organization, one of these years) and found appropriate yarn and cast on and realized shortly thereafter that I can only knit for short stints at at time when wearing this brace. Ugh. And while it is tempting to take the brace off to knit, I also know that knitting for *long* periods of time was aggravating my elbow.

I went to First Friday craft night, as this was the First Friday of November, and picked up my mom on the way, and it was a very small group this time, which was nice. The hostess’s cat decided she was in dire need of some lap time Right Now, so it worked out well for me – I could knit for short periods of time and then take a break mainly because I suddenly had a very determined cat on my lap who made it quite clear that I was to sit there and do nothing but give her attention.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

Ever since we moved, back in July, my arm has been bothering me; or rather, more specifically, my elbow. At first I chalked it up to just being overworked during that crazy week of hauling furniture and boxes around and laying laminate flooring (the week that consequently stretched into a month – or was it two – but let’s not go there, shall we?), and I assumed that eventually it would go away on its own. But as the weeks progressed and the elbow stubbornly refused to heal, and I found myself unable to even pick up a gallon of milk with my right hand without wincing in pain I finally decided that gee, maybe I ought to have it looked at.

So this afternoon I headed off to Davis to see my doctor, and after giving him a brief explanation of my problem and what I assumed had caused it, he grinned, took my hand, bent it down, and then said ‘push your hand up’, and the instant I even *thought* about trying to bend that wrist, holy crap the pain. Because it turns out that that one particular muscle in the elbow that I have oh-so-cleverly managed to injure is sort of the meeting place for where all the muscles in the wrist come together. And basically, through the combination of hefting boxes and laying laminate flooring, both of which required me to put a lot more stress on my wrists than my body is used to, I managed to give myself tennis elbow. Yay me.

The problem with muscle injuries is that you really just need to let them sit unused for long periods of time to encourage them to heal, but since I am right handed, and this is my right elbow, and also my life requires a lot of repetitive wrist movements (I work on a computer, I knit), this thing just never got a chance to heal. So the doctor prescribed me large quantities of ibuprofin and also a brace that I am to wear on my arm. The brace is an interesting little creation, because basically it puts pressure on the muscle right below the elbow, and because it’s putting pressure there (as he explained it, and bear in mind I am *not* a doctor so I may not have the whole thing straight), it tricks the body into thinking that the muscle stops at the pressure point and not at the elbow, and when I do things with my right wrist, it will use the lower part of the muscle and leave the injured part (at the elbow) alone to heal in peace and quiet.

Of course, he also mentioned that I should try to learn how to mouse left handed, and then switch back and forth so I’m not putting all the strain on just one arm (this should be interesting, for the laugh potential if nothing else) and oh yeah. I am to avoid a lot of repetitive wrist movement (see above for why I might have given a faint snicker of disbelief at *that* part of the prescription), and oh by the way this could still take up to six months to heal.

Oh well. I will be good and follow all his orders (as much as I can) because I have already been reading stories from people who’ve had this and who note that it might never go entirely away and I would really like to one day be able to pull a mixing bowl out of the cupboard with my right hand again without wincing. And in the meantime, I will just add this to the slowly growing list of ways in which I have managed to injure myself in weird ways – the most notable being wrenching my back bending over to pick up a three pound kitten, breaking my foot walking barefoot down a carpeted hall, and now, contracting tennis elbow from laying laminate flooring. My talent, it really does know no bounds.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.

The invitation did say “Bring finger food.”

(Recipe here)

The real estate agent called me this morning. “I have bad news,” he said, after we exchanged hellos.

I knew what was coming next, even if the grin in his voice hadn’t already given it away.

“You now only own one house.”

And with that, this huge weight that has been sitting on our shoulders for the past five months evaporated as if it had never been. The house is sold. Escrow has closed. It is done.

I know we are lucky. Incredibly lucky. In this market, where every time I turn around the news on the housing market is worse and worse; where one out of every 5 or 6 houses on the market is a foreclosure; where tales of doom actually match the reality of the situation; in this market, we have actually sold our house. No, not just sold it. We sold it and made a profit. Anyone out there who’s been trying to sell a house right now knows how slim those odds are.

It feels odd, to know that this is over. We have known it was coming, ever since sale #3 passed all the critical milestones – full funding approved, all contingencies released (early), every indication that the new owners actually *like* our house and wanted it badly enough to find a way to meet our counter offer. But with this market, and still smarting from the two previous failed offers, there was always this fear that things could still fall apart, and we’d be right back where we started.

We drove by the old house this past weekend, to drop off all the keys and garage door openers, and we walked around the whole thing slowly, for the very last time. How tiny the office looks, now that the built-in furniture is gone. How strange the downstairs looks, with the new, ivory paint. How odd it was to walk around the yard, looking at the trees, remembering when they were first planted, commenting on how much the silver sage keeps on spreading to take over the back corner, noting how much the new owners’ kids will enjoy playing, back behind the strawberry tree, trying to remember where in the raised flower bed that Rebecca and Allegra lie.

This was once our house. Once our home. Once upon a time, I knelt by the open window as dusk settled and listened to the rain outside as it pattered on the roof. Once, long ago, I spent three days sponge painting that dining room in three amazingly gorgeous shades of blue. Once, back in time, we hosted family dinners there, and the nephews and niece ran crazily up and down the stairs and through the back yard there, and we all sat outside in lawn chairs, covered in blankets I knit by hand and we watched fireworks late into the night.But it is not our house anymore, and more importantly, it is no longer our home. It hasn’t been our home since the moment we cleared it of every single possession and moved to our quirky Sacramento home, with the odd cement circles in the backyard, and the squirrels who chitter without fear at any passer by, and the eye-crossing wallpaper that apparently lies just underneath the paint in the entire downstairs.

So now it is over. We have said goodbye. We left the keys and things on the kitchen counter and pulled the back door locked and closed behind us, knowing we can now never enter again without first knocking on the door. We only own one house now. And I cannot even begin to describe how wonderful this makes me feel.

Saturday was our lazy day for the weekend. In the morning I finished the most recent jigsaw puzzle I’ve been working on (I had to go dig around and unpack them once I got a yen to make a few. I’d forgotten just how much I like doing jigsaw puzzles). We lounged around and read books and pet cats. We went out in search of new slippers for me (did not find any) and instead bought a new undercoat brush for the cats because, like the toaster and the battery recharger, this, too, disappeared in the move. We sat at the dining room table with a stack of cookbooks and recipes and picked out a pile to try, and then did a massive grocery shopping trip. We ate dinner out at a little local bistro – wild mushroom pizza for me and a thick cheeseburger for him – and splurged on pear cobbler and flourless dark chocolate torte for dessert.

Sunday was the day for working. The last massive freezer-stocking spree worked out so well we decided to give it another shot. This time around I tried to do better about making a comprehensive grocery list (and yet still managed to completely forget to pick up two things, although this time we simply made do with substitutes from the pantry instead of doing a one-item grocery run). This time we also did a tiny bit of pre-planning. I figured out which items should be done first, by virtue of those being the ones that could be cooking in the oven while we worked on everything else. Richard peeled and shredded a mountain of onions (the house still smells of them, even the next morning) and I peeled and grated a smaller mountain of carrots. And over the course of about four hours, we managed to make 10 different dinners and one odd little carrot cake that called for a can of diet lemon-lime cola, and turned out pretty tasty, for something that more resembled a carroty sort of brownie than a cake at all. For the two of us, that’s 31 meals total (they didn’t all make the same number of servings), which isn’t bad at all for four hours of chopping and stirring and measuring and bagging and somehow, despite the extremely limited counter space in our mostly disfunctional kitchen, to stay out of each other’s way.

We left the crockpot simmering all by itself, and I covered up the one remaining meal to assemble, when Richard’s friend called and came over to see the new house. We all went out to dinner (since all the stuff we just made was already in the freezer) and by the time we came home, hours later, the stuff in the crockpot was finally done. I assembled the bean and rice and cheese wraps (I made only half the recipe, which filled the largest bowl we own and made 10 wraps, good grief) and occasionally put away another stack of dishes while Richard made his way slowly through the mountain of pots and pans and bowls and utensils we’d managed to accumulate on the counter.

In a way, even though it was sometimes tedious and the smell of onions in the beginning had both of us tearing up and leaping wildly to turn on fans and open windows, this was fun. Richard brought out his little set of speakers and his mp3 player and we listened to Jonathan Coultan, and mocked the cats who could not help themselves in their optimistic hope that one of the times they heard the can opener, it would be something for them, and not just another can of tomato sauce or beans. We made a few of the recipes from last time again, since we liked them so much, and tasted all the new ones just to make sure we liked them too. We took a short break to eat the leftover wild mushroom pizza from the night before, and try out the curious carrot brownie creation (surprisingly tasty, even though it is disconcerting to see, but not taste, the carrot in what you are eating). And as I carefully packaged up the contents of the crockpot (an amazingly delicious sloppy joe sort of concoction, but with chicken instead) and double-bagged it in case of leakage, and opened the freezer to put it away, it gave me a nice sense of accomplishment door and see all those neatly stacked bags full of healthy, delicious food that we made ourselves.

The very best part of any performance I have ever been in is the very second when it is done; when the last note has finished and the director lowers his hands and the audience bursts into applause and you know that no matter what might or might not have happened, it is done. You can take a deep breath and relax your shoulders and close your music folder and finally let yourself look out, past the director, into the audience, and smile at your fellow performers and live in just that split second moment with all of them, in that sheer relief that all this work leading up to that moment was actually worth it. Because no matter what might have gone wrong (like, say, the entire second alto section spontaneously forgetting to sing an entire phrase – all three of us – but coming right back in for the next, so that no one beyond the director would ever know), it is over, and damn if we didn’t just blow them all away.

Dress rehearsal on Friday night went quite well – far better than the dress rehearsals for all previous concerts up to this point. It’s the first time that we, as a group, felt like we’d really nailed everything – even the one piece all of us singers felt really fell apart apparently sounded just fine. Amusingly, this was, of course, the first dress rehearsal that was closed door (for previous concerts we’ve let people come in to listen, for a reduced ticket price).

The concert on Saturday night was sold out. Literally sold out, to the point where we had to start late because there were people still coming in, and where they actually had to turn people away at the door. I suspect part of this is due to the fact that our concert was selected as Critic’s Choice for the weekend in the Sacramento Bee, as well as to having new members (and thus new people to hit up for ticket sales) in the group. Nevertheless, it was a little nerve wracking to realize we were going to be singing to a completely packed house. We’ve talked about the eventual possibility of going to two shows for each concert; looks like we may have to address that sooner rather than later.

I nailed my solo Friday night. Wasn’t nervous at all, until I stepped forward Saturday night, during the real thing, and the strings played the opening chords and then it took every ounce of willpower I had in me to rein in the stage fright that suddenly erupted. I nailed it anyway though, as much as I was able, stage fright be damned. Funny how no matter how many times I perform – whether it’s singing in a choir, or playing the oboe in a concert, or slicing through the water in nothing but a bathing suit and too much make-up for a synchronized swimming show – I cannot ever shake the nerves. I guess some things you really never do grow out of.

I slept in today. There are a lot of things I should have been doing this morning, like getting up and maybe doing laundry and taking out the garbage and seeing whether or not we’ll be able to peel all the wallpaper off the walls in the round room, and watering the back yard, and trapping Checkers in the bathroom so I can trim her (too long) nails), but instead, I slept in. My brain finally shut off, just once, and let me sleep in, blissfully, until after 9am. It was lovely.

We had brunch at a little cafe we were introduced to a few weeks ago by some friends of Richard. We sat at high tables and ate omelets oozing with meat and cheese, and potatoes that were perfect. We drove downtown and wandered around Old Sacramento, because the weather was too lovely not to take advantage. We went to the chocolate store and he got a frozen banana and I had ice cream. I bought a puzzle with dragons on it, and we took it home and I sat at the dining room table and put it together while he sat at his computer and worked on his writing. I read a few books. We watched some TV. None of the things I should have been doing got done, and that’s okay. Because it was a perfectly lovely day.