For the past few days I’ve come home from work and immediately gone into the back yard to stumble around in the dark and see if maybe, just maybe, anything had changed. This evening I finally got lucky.

Scattered around the perimeter of the yard, in the freshly de-weeded areas beyond the paths, are dozens of pots holding a vast assortment of green things. There are trees and there are bushes and there are little shrubby things that are quite possibly rosemary or even day lilies. It’s almost impossible to make them out in the dark, what with them all having dark colored bark and sitting in dark colored pots, but occasionally a silhouette would appear against the night sky and I could do my best to imagine what it might be. The two tall evergreen things are most likely the coastal redwoods, and there was just enough light for me to make out the little tag on the one lone tree sitting in the middle of the path, away from all the others. My little white peach tree, sitting there, looking so bare and fragile, soon to be planted with pomegranate and tangelo and walnut and apple and all the others.

By the end of the week we will be one whole heck of a lot closer to having our back yard complete. Granted, the worst of it isn’t over even with all the planting of trees and the spreading of bark that will be commencing shortly. After all there are two entire areas that must eventually be covered in paving stones, and another arbor to build or buy, and once those are done yet more shrubs and flowers and trees to plant. But this gets us a lot closer, and oh how anxious I am for morning to come so I can go out and see the new arrivals as more than just dark shadows in an evening shrouded patch of yard.

We have had rainstorms here before. There have been days since I started this job where we have stopped what we were doing to stare out the window as it pours from the sky in great sheets of water into the river below. But something about the rainstorm yesterday made me stop and stare more than usual.

It wasn’t the rain itself that caught my eye because it happened during one of the brief lulls that occurred throughout the day, amid the bouts of crazy rain. I happened to glance out my window at just the right angle and realized that I could actually see downtown Sacramento in the distance.

I can normally see the higher buildings, since after all our office is right on the Sacramento River, and we’re only a mile or two away from old town. But usually there is a little bit of a misty look to the view, as if the city is lurking behind some gossamer veil. But after the rain – that heavy rain that cleared the air completely – I could see the city clearly for the first time. All the buildings stood in stark contrast against the sky. I could see the cars as they sped down the highway across the river, far away. In the park that spans the distance between our office and downtown I could see No Parking signs. And closer still, across the river I could see that the bushes that line the banks were heavy with tiny red berries.

It usually doesn’t even occur to me to think that the air around Sacramento might not be the best of quality. I suppose after a while you just get used to the fact that you see everything through a bit of a haze. And so to see it so starkly defined against the leaden gray of the cloud-covered sky was shocking, and also a little unnerving. It was a clear reminder of just how bad the air can be. Oh, we’re nowhere near the thick and yellowish smog that coats Los Angeles like a layer of grease, but the air is not as clean as I have been apparently fooling myself it might be.

The rain continued on and off all afternoon. It was as if the clouds would pour out everything they had, all at once, and then scurry off to refill as quickly as possible before returning to repeat the process all over again. Later on, as the sun began to set and the rain was still falling, I glanced outside and noticed that the buildings of downtown Sacramento were only visible through that barely-there haze that I’m so used to. Only now it’s much more noticeable, now that I have that perfect, sharply lighted cityscape etched in my brain.

I think that, what with the holidays during the fall and winter, we should be given an extra day off of work this time of year. One extra day before Thanksgiving, and one extra day before Christmas (or whatever your winter holiday of choice might be) – and the sole purpose of those extra days is to stay home and bake. It can be anything at all. If you’re feeling particularly industrious, it could be a few different batches of bread – pumpkin and nut and banana and cinnamon swirl. If you’re the type who’s a bit intimidated by the whole concept of yeast and stirring, swing by the grocery store and pick up a few tubes of those ready-to-bake cookies. And if cooking really isn’t your thing at all, buy some pre-made cookies and a few tubes of icing, stay home, and have some happy decorating fun.

It’s always about this time of year that I start to get a little overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done. And I do this knowing full well that it’s no one’s fault but my own. The problem is that I want, very much, to have the time to do all the baking and decorating and homey sort of nesting that I want, but pesky things like work and choir practice and buying gifts and sending cards and paying bills tends to get in the way. I think that I just need a job where I can take about six weeks off, starting in mid November, and get it all out of my system and then come back the week after Christmas when it’s all over, feeling perky and refreshed and ready to get back to the business at hand.

The colder it gets the more I want to either dive into a mad frenzy of holiday baking, or else burrow underneath blankets with books and cats and freshly baked goodies from the previously mentioned baking frenzies. I avoid malls like the plague these days (and am inordinately proud of the fact that this year we were able to get all but a handful of presents online) but the slowly accumulating pile of packages that arrive in uneven intervals on our doorstep, the quick flashes of holiday music I catch on the radio before I quickly switch over to NPR, the smells of gingerbread and cider wafting out from scented candles and bakeries everywhere I turn, and the glimpses of decorations that are slowly making their way up in stores downtown, drag me, quite willingly, into the holiday spirit. I can’t help it, after all. It’s insidious, this holiday mood. This is the time of year colored with some of my favorite things – pine trees and cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg, apples and chocolate. Any long ride alone in my car, where the only tape I ever seem to have at hand is an old Amy Grant Christmas album, is enough to get me dreaming of trees and lights and mulling cider on the stove.

And most of all, it makes me long for days off to bake.

This entry is a collaboration for On Display. This month’s (okay, technically this was November’s) topic is “spice.”

We are all about the traditions in this house. And this year, even though we were headed out of town for Thanksgiving and all the preparation of food (two kinds of bread and green bean casserole) had already either been done, or the ingredients purchased and sitting on the counter or in the freezer, Richard still got to partake in one of the most time-honored traditions of beleaguered husbands everywhere come Thanksgiving morning. He was sent to the store.

Of course, in this case, we sort of had to deviate a teensy bit from tradition, because the reason he was sent to the store is that he was closer to being dressed than I was, and as I put it to him, either he went to the store to get a new box of Swiffer wet pads, or else we would ‘get’ to mop the entire dining room and kitchen floor on our hands and knees with sponges and rags instead.

And this, of course, is because as I was putting together the green bean casserole Thursday morning in preparation for our trek down the freeways (along with several million other food-bearing people) to my in-laws’ place for Thanksgiving, I opened the cupboard door under the kitchen sink to throw something away, and discovered that the trash bag was crawling with ants. As I followed the trail, yelping my disgust, I discovered that they had come from across the kitchen, up the side of the door jamb into the dining room, and after I dove for the bug spray and we were wiping up ants and residual Raid off the kitchen linoleum, Richard discovered a secondary trail into the dining room. Once the first wave of ants was wiped up and I had dragged out the vacuum to suck up all their little dead bodies, I discovered that there were a lot more ants all over the dining room floor and table, randomly scattered here and there. And at that point I realized that we if we did not do *something*, we were going to be coming back home to a house that would be crawling with the nasty little critters. So off he went to the store.

Aside from the ants, however, it really was a marvelous Thanksgiving. Since my dad’s in Germany for an assignment, my mom volunteered to be on-call over the holiday (since she is a hospital chaplain) and was going to be all alone on Thanksgiving Day – a state, she assured us, she was perfectly comfortable with. So she wouldn’t miss out on the whole family gathering thing completely, we had her over to dinner Wednesday night and invited my older sister and her family as well. It was supposed to be a surprise but they hit far more traffic than expected coming down so Mom figured it out before they arrived.

It might as well have been a Thanksgiving feast all on its own from the amount of food. Richard grilled Cornish game hens (split in twos) on the grill with a rosemary rub, and I made the sweet potato and garlic thing that I adore. There was a vat of wild rice and a huge pile of steamed green beans with roasted garlic on top, cranberry sauce, cider mulling on the stove and pumpkin bread freshly baked that afternoon, and gingerbread with whipped cream for dessert. I had to dash out for about 45 minutes in the middle of the festivities because I volunteered to be the accompanist at the Thanksgiving Eve service (which necessitated some rather frantic practicing of the hymns since I didn’t actually find out what I was supposed to *play* til Tuesday night), but it all worked out. And the most Thanksgiving-y part of the whole meal was the fact that we ended up cooking enough for twice as many people and so despite my best efforts the fridge is full of leftovers. Well, all except for the gingerbread, which served quite nicely as Thanksgiving breakfast for Richard and I the next morning.

Thanksgiving at Richard’s parents’ house was a low-key and entertaining affair. There was, naturally, much stuffing of food into our faces, and passing of heaping plates of all manner of good things, and then that was all followed by a rousing rendition of “I’m Henry the 8th, I Am!” at the top of our lungs (No, I have no idea why either except that it was spontaneous and noisy and fun), and then there was pumpkin cheesecake which was just enough to send most of us into a blissful food-induced coma. And in case any of us had had the nerve to recover from all of the eating on Thursday, today included a huge breakfast with chocolate chip waffles and freshly whipped cream, chicken-apple sausage omelets, and copious amounts of coffee to try to fend off the overeating sleepies. We bought ornaments and found a slightly shy but mostly friendly orange cat to pet, and went to a a matineee showing of Elf, which was surprisingly much cuter (although just as predictable) than expected, and then that was all followed by a meal of all the leftovers from yesterday’s feast, and the final touch was even more coffee because after all of that food about the only thing any of us want to do is curl up somewhere and take a very long nap. Or at least curl up with the fire place on (now that we are home) and do something that requires absolutely no thought, and certainly no eating.

Although if more pumpkin cheesecake or gingerbread magically appeared right in front of me, forget I ever said anything about being full. It’s all about the traditions, after all.

I wish I could say that the reason I haven’t been writing is because I’m doing a lot of work on the novel, but that’s not really the case. I think it’s more to do with the fact that I’m feeling a bit guilty for not being further along on the novel than I should, and so avoid doing any kind of writing at all in some futile effort to make my brain focus on what it should be focusing on instead of what it wants to do.

I did have one particularly productive day this past week where I churned out about 7000 words in the space of only a few hours, but the rest of it’s come in dribs and drabs, and by this weekend I’d only managed to just break 30,000 words.

It’s been kind of a busy week, though, so it’s not as if I’ve had oodles of time to write. It seems lately like I have something scheduled every evening after work. Tuesday night I made two more batches of bread (this time it was nut bread) for the bazaar, and then Wednesday night was bible study, where we continued our trend of singing Veggie Tales songs every time a story crops up in the Old Testament chapters we’re reading that Big Idea has covered. We especially had fun making references to the Pie Wars, and how it is wrong to covet your neighbor’s rubber ducky (go rent King George and the Rubber Ducky if you’re completely lost here). Thursday night was choir practice, as usual, and I brought my oboe and had marvelous fun switching back and forth (in the same song) between playing and singing. Another tenor did show up but he hasn’t been back so it’s still just me. And Friday night I went over to a friend’s house, bringing with me all the flats of pomegranate jelly we made, and we ate an incredibly delicious chicken pot pie and then spent a few hours cutting out little squares of fabric and attaching the tags to the jars. I’d say we did a pretty good job because the bazaar (which I had to miss – sniffle) was yesterday and our jelly sold like crazy. We’re already all talking about how we’ll have to make even more next year, now that we know what we’re doing (well, sort of). We also worked on arranging a few songs for the food fight at church because this year the women’s and the men’s ensembles are the team leaders and so it’s our job to get up in front of the congregation and do our best to encourage them to bring lots and lots of food for the food bank in town.

Yesterday was a mostly non-writing day because I drove down to San Jose and met up with Richard’s sisters and mom and niece and his oldest sister’s matron-of-honor-to-be, and we all spent a few hours having fun at the Jessica McClintock store trying on bridesmaid dresses. I’d link to a picture but I can’t find one, and besides, the four of us all ended up choosing completely different styles (which was fine with the bride-to-be because all she wanted was for us to be in the same color and fabric), all of which are just gorgeous. Also I was faced with the fact that Richard’s niece somehow turned 16 without me catching on (because for whatever reason my brain insists that she has stayed eternally stuck at age 11), and has developed…um…womanly parts. I am not old enough to have a niece who has womanly parts, darn it.

Dresses ordered, we then consumed huge plates of Mongolian barbeque (in which I think I may have managed to consume my five required servings of veggies in one meal) and then I headed off to Napa (with a quick detour through Concord to go to the Trader Joe’s, which had the gall to actually be *out* of the cheese blintzes that were the sole reason for the side trip!) for my brother-in-law’s birthday. There was Chinese food in a restaurant with a huge fish tank which was far more exciting to my youngest nephew than anything on his plate, and there were presents, and angel food cake with sweet whipped cream (so very good!) and lots of chatter around the table, until Richard and I checked the time and realized that it was getting late so we headed home to be greeted by a horde of cats who had to wait a whole TWO HOURS past their dinner time to get fed (oh, the drama).

And that brings us to today, which has included a lot of music (oboe and voice) and a lot of laughing and chatting with new people, and then a few hours of napping because the last few days have worn me out. So I might be trailing further and further behind on this darn novel, but at least I’ve been having fun while not writing.

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.

********

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.