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Chilly
I know I’m the first one to say how much I love changing leaves and gusty winds and gray skies, but it’s fifty-seven degrees outside and not much hotter in, because the building’s heat won’t kick in for another few weeks.
So I’m sitting at my desk wearing four layers and a jacket, with bluish hands and purple nails. (Who needs Essie when you have the cold?)
Anyway, this will infuse my work with an Emersonian sense of nature, right?
Right?
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Boo!
Wh-shhhhhhhhhhh.
Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Cl-chomp.
Respectively, my apartment’s source of heat, my bi-polar hard drive, and the strange equine sound coming from the construction site across the street. Together, the chorus of my day.
And though I hate them all, the first one signals fall and winter and all the goodies that come with. Like today, my second or third favorite day of the year. (Yeah, yeah, I’m obvious: Birthday, Christmas, Halloween.)
However, I have to say, this year I’m somewhat of a Halloween delinquent. I didn’t start the prep on my costume (or Eric’s) until last night, I didn’t buy any candy, and I barely have plans tonight. Not my usual apple-bobbing self, for sure.
But the one tradition I did manage to keep is making Halloween treats for friends and family. Finished last night, the peanut butter bars from Baked.
They’re no less delicious upside down, by the way.
Here’s Eric packaging them up. Nice and easy: parchment paper and Halloween Orange tape instead of string.
Costume photos to follow, of a somewhat haphazard geisha and a burly lumberjack (in place of the planned Lucy (of I Love) and Ghostbuster (with home-built pack; no other way to go)). Next year…
For now it’s time to go recycle the three-foot-tall stack of magazines trying to sell me Christmas crap already.
Wait! Before you go, be scared by Eric.
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So…
Since it’s deliciously cool outside, it’s football season, and the leaves are actually falling this year, I’m looking for ways to dress the apartment up in some homeyness.
But now that I’m all grown up, I don’t really know what that means. Am I looking for my mother’s kitchen with the plaster rooster, floral wallpaper accents, and colonial dinette set? No.
I just want that fall flavor. That sense of warmth you get when you come in from the cold with ruddy cheeks, when you peel off the outer layers and get comfy, knowing Halloween is this week, and soon it’ll be Thanksgiving. I’m missing that feeling of standing at the front door with a little chill, the only barrier between me and the cold, an aluminum door and some tempered glass.
So I’m thinking about things like bringing flowers in, hanging a many-shades-of-brown-and-yellow wreath on the front door, and getting a pumpkin.
And I’m toying with the idea of breaking some house rules (maintain flat surfaces, minimal living, one-tv-is-enough) and adding a baby flat screen to the kitchen. There was always a tiny tv in my mother’s kitchen. The tv where we watched the news and Jeopardy, where the Thanksgiving Day parade flickered despite all attempts at fixing the antenae.
We all know you can’t go back home, but I’m wondering if this is one thing I can recapture: the kitchen as a place to hang out.
PROS:
TV = More cooking, more often.
Less eating out/ ordering in.
House smells nice like yummy food.
Able to watch It’s a Wonderful Life while cracking the annual peppermint bark.
There’s a tv in the kitchen.
CONS:
We become a middle of the country household with two televisions, going on ten.
Holes under the cabinet.
Ruined “clean” look in here.
I gain ten pounds.
There’s a tv in the kitchen.
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This is the item under consideration. Yea or Nay?
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Goals, and stuff
It’s always at this point in the summer when I start thinking about needing to be made warm again, instead of paying attention to all the sweating and wishing I had a suitable device to keep me permanently cool. (And the inventor of modern air conditioning rolls in his grave.)
So I’m fantasizing about what I’m going to knit to wear on a much breezier day, hopefully one during which leaves fall from trees.
But every time I knit something, I go chunky. Because I’m lazy. And because the yarn is so soft! And because I’m lazy. (I love the quick knits.)
But this is what happened the last time I chose “super chunky”.
I became chunky along with the sweater, and no, I’m not going to include that photo. I frogged this thing for a couple of hats about five minutes after it came off the needles.
Anyway, I feel like knitting this:
But it’s going to take a lot of this:
Not a bunch of men changing giant clocks. It’s going to take a lot of time. Maybe I’ll start tomorrow… right after I clean out that closet.
