goblinbox

In which I post a picture of the dress I made last weekend.

It’s made of rayon knit. I had already drawn the pattern for the 4-panel skirt, so for this project I copied a favorite long-sleeved t-shirt for the bodice, and made up the cowl – which is big enough to be a hood or a capelet – as I went along.

It is not now, nor will it probably ever be, hemmed.

I really want a serger!

[moar the dress pictures]

In which there are clothes now that didn’t exist before because I made them. Plus photography and food because I’m a woman of leisure with many hobbies. Many!

I found an orange cloud filter on eBay last Friday, which made me think that I should buy some Polaroid film for my classic Land camera.

Well, it turns out that Polaroid stopped making instant film last December and I have no idea which Fuji films will fit in my 103! So I posted my question here and the nice photography geeks assured me that most of the Fuji instant films will fit. Whew. Now I want another classic Polaroid camera… maybe this one.

Friday night Teh BF took me to the PnE, where I drank FAR too much. I drunkenly made plans to hang out with Lannie for Saturday, so I actually had to get out of bed on Saturday morning and act like a real human being in spite of The Curse™ and the hangover and everything.

Lannie came over somewhere in the neighborhood of ten in the morning, and somehow I produced mugs of tea and hash browns and veggie sausages and eggs over easy and we had brunch together. Then I got the sewing machine set up, and we got to sewing… or we were going to get to sewing, but I’d somehow managed to purchase carpet thread and there was no way I was going to sew lightweight rayon knit with freakin’ carpet thread.

So we all went to JoAnne’s – even G’ma, who needed some flower stuff for the porch – and I bought thread. And I also grabbed 1.5 yards of green rayon knit and matching thread and made Lannie a dress out of it because she’s a poor starving college student with no money and the stuff was only thirteen bucks.

When we got back to the house I poured myself a glass of Coke and whipped up a tube top dress for Lannie. She’s in love with it. My pattern needs 2 yards of fabric but I’d forgotten that and only bought her 1.5 yards, so instead of a 4-panel skirt she got a 2-panel skirt with kick pleats. It worked out well, though, and she was totally involved in the design process and we used damn near every inch of the fabric we bought.

Then I made myself a dress. In fact, I made myself THE dress! It’s the coolest thing ever! Totally custom and awesome! It’s brown, of course, and floor length and long-sleeved and has this big cowl thing that can be worn loose or as a capelet or up as a hood and I absolutely love it. (The only reason I’m not wearing it today was that I was trying to exercise a little restraint since I’ve basically been wearing it since it came off the machine Saturday afternoon. Yeah.)

Saturday night Kaje and I went out for Mexican food and then went back to his place and stayed in. I think we watched about three chick flicks this weekend because he’s indulgent and I had The Curse™.

When we went to Petco on Sunday, the clerk asked me where I’d gotten my dress and told me she really liked it. I got to say, “Uh, I made it. Yesterday! It isn’t even hemmed yet!” It was really gratifying. I felt like a sewing rockstar!

My next sewing project will be a wrap. Something out of the purple cotton knit I have. Something that’s sleeveless and about knee-length with a button hole in the side and long ties that wrap around the waist. I haven’t designed the pattern yet, but knit’s very forgiving so hopefully it’ll turn out as well as The Dress did!

This morning I made spicy potato curry for my bento. Since there was enough, I packed a bento for my bro as well and he said “nom nom nom” and eated it right up. I’m like the Easter Bunny of bento or something!

Teh BF’s birthday is next month. He likes to golf for some reason, so he’ll probably be spending a weekend at Wildhorse and he said I can come too. While he and Caddie are out smacking little balls around with expensive metal sticks, I intend to soak in the hot tub until I turn into a prune.

In which I still need a vacation, but haven’t scheduled one yet. (Teh BF says he’s taking me to Wildhorse casino for his birthday next month, though, so that’ll be good.)

Since my content is so lame, I am including images. I love you too.

WEATHER
I am tired of this ten-degrees-below-average-for-this-time-of-year weather. The wind, overcast skies, and unnecessary chill are all getting on my nerves.

I want spring to get here already. Isn’t wonderfully mild weather the whole point of living here?

BENTO
Here’s my lunch. Innit adorable?

Making it this morning and then eating it this afternoon will doubtless prove to be the absolute highlights of the first ten hours of my day. Happy Monday.

WORK
My employer is advertising to hire another employee! I’m almost giddy with relief, actually. I had myself all convinced I was about to get laid off.

Silly brain.

THE DOG
My G’ma is feeding my dog entirely too much. AGAIN. The stuff she’s feeding Bindu not only keeps the dog on the verge of obesity, but it also gives her itchy butt, runny stools, and gas. (I realize that’s entirely TMI but food that does such things to a creature cannot be at all acceptable.)

I’ve tried being nice to G’ma, I’ve tried reason, I’ve tried being openly hostile, and I’ve tried simply keeping the dog away from the house as much as possible, all to no avail: there is no way to get the woman to stop overfeeding my dog each and every chance she gets.

I have resolved to go buy appropriate dog foods this Sunday – boring old IAMS or Nutro kibbles (and, in a massive nod toward compromise, some canned food as well) that the dog is unlikely to gorge upon. I will bring these items home and put them in the pantry, and I will then proceed to throw the crap G’ma stocks right out into the garbage. The sheer wastefulness will, I hope, get her attention.

I’ve had this dog through scores of jobs, men, and miscarriages. Bindu is the love of my life and my baby. I will not let the length and quality of her little blue life be compromised because G’ma apparently feels compelled to spoil animals to death.

THE BELOVED NETBOOK
I watched the director’s cut of Blade Runner in bed last night. With earphones in and the Eee PC on my chest, it was a totally awesome movie-watching experience!

I really love my tiny little laptoplette.

ANNOYING THINGS
* The grocery store two blocks from my house no longer accepts my debit card, so in order to shop there I have to take cash out of the ATM and pay $1.50 for the privilege. Fuck that.

* I remain unconvinced that I can crawl back to the bandleader and be civil enough to get my old gig back. I’m just too wrapped up in my ego’s utter rage at being fired for no reason (I’ve never been fired from a band in my life, and particularly not when I did everything I was supposed to do). I’m thinking of cutting my finger nails and taking my Breedlove to open mic come Wednesday.

I can’t play for shit, but they’ll let me on stage anyway because they know I can sing.

* My dog is still fat, and it’s not even my fault.

* I don’t have a bicycle and am, apparently, too stupid to get one bought.

THE NEW HOBBY
This evening, after spending some time with Teh BF, I hope to move forward on some of this:

I really want to change my whole master plan and make the awesome dress out of the purple stuff (because it’s cotton instead of rayon), but I won’t. I will stick to the plan, because it will give me a chance to adjust the pattern with fabric that I don’t like as much. Then I can go out and buy moar cotton knit next weekend! Yay!

THE OLD HOBBY
I haven’t knit anything in months.

Apparently I’m as incon(si)stant with my hobbies as I am with literally everything else.

In which I might start buying fabric and sewing it into clothing! Or… or not.

My clothes suck. They’re old, or weird and out of context, or cheesy because I bought them from Walmart. Add to this the fact that my body stopped being 25 fifteen years ago and is now oddly shaped, and the whole clothing thing is practically a crisis.

While I do know how to sew, I never really enjoyed it and I haven’t done very much of it. I used to prefer store-bought clothes because handmade clothes struck me (when I was a a kid) as being dowdy and poor-looking, and I’ve always been secretly stuck-up in my own dirty, messy way.

Recently, though, I realized that my favorite items of clothing are not just dresses: they’re unique, one-of-a-kind handmade dresses. All of them.

The last thing I made was a bridesmaid’s dress for a marriage that is already defunct. It–the dress, not the marriage–was an eggplant purple six-panel floor length gown with spaghetti straps and diaphanous off-the-shoulder butterfly sleeves.

I snipped the sleeves off and I still wear the dress sometimes, under a t-shirt, as a skirt. The bride’s mother had promised to do all the hems and didn’t have time to finish before the ceremony, so my hem was tacked up with iron-on facing on the floor in the chapel and I barely had it back on my body before I had to find my place for the processional. The polyester lining in the bodice was once tacked down by hand but has since broken loose and floats around in there with my girls and is generally very plastic and very irritating. I should throw the damned thing out, but it’s EGGPLANT PURPLE and FLOOR LENGTH and has a REALLY KILLER SPIN and I MADE IT. I think I once intended to fix the hem and chop off the bodice and turn it into a proper skirt, but that’s never happened.

Anyway! Last week I spent four entire hours surfing for handmade clothing on Etsy (where I bought a dress, a hoodie, and two demi hoodies) and as I looked through hundreds of hand-made knit items of clothing I kept thinking, “Well, that’s super cute! But pretty expensive. But cute! Hmm. It totally wouldn’t be that hard to make… if a person owned a serger. Which I don’t. But I do know how to make a French seam…”

Since then I’ve been thinking about designing myself some custom clothes. I’d have to buy fabric and set up the machine aunt Sue left at the house last fall when she upgraded her own machine, and cut things out and pin them together and actually sew them up… but I could probably manage to do that, for a cute dress or top or pair of leggings or three.

I’ve discovered that cheap sergers can be had online for about $150. Seriously, I almost bought one last week – even though I haven’t sewn a single stitch in at least a decade – but I decided I’d have to actually produce and wear several items the hard way before buying myself a piece of equipment.

Most of my ideas involve knits. I’m a knitter, and knit is really comfortable to wear and live in. (Am I the only one who’s noticed that the 40-somethings are the ones wearing all the ugly knit track and lounge clothes? It must have something to do with the way your body feels when you’re this age – you suddenly can’t stand things that bind, so you buy what’s comfortable… and sadly what’s comfortable is fugly knit separates from Walmart. I definitely like to be comfortable, it’s just that I don’t want to be caught dead in a fucking knit pantsuit.)

I really adore a lot of the stuff I’ve seen here, here, and here and I have a lot of ideas for clothes along similar lines. (Actually, if I were being honest I wouldn’t call them ‘ideas’ so much as the ‘blatant theft of designs I’ve seen on Etsy.’) Several of the items I’d like to add to my wardrobe are just too expensive to buy (like this $400 dress and wrap combo I’m totally lusting over – OMG I would wear the holy living shit out of that little number). I understand the pricing completely – when you factor in your labor and your materials and your design time, that’s just how much it costs to produce a handmade item – but I’m just not spending two hundred bucks on a knit dress no matter how incredibly adorable it is.

With both avarice and poverty spurring me on, it occurs to me that I could easily take my favorite knit shirt, draw a pattern from it, add a 4-panel floor length skirt and a loose cowl, and turn it into a reasonable facsimile of the dress I’m in love with. And if that works out, I could probably come up with some kind of cute wrap for texture and pockets and to slightly disguise my pudge. And from there it shouldn’t be too hard to make a couple of pairs of pants and a few tops and some fun layering items.

I could do it for far less than I could buy it for on Etsy and I’ll never find a similar item in a store, not ever. And, most importantly, it would keep me from buying any more awful knitwear from fucking Walmart because I have no clothes that aren’t old, weird and out of context, or cheesy.

Meanwhile, I haven’t done any knitting in months and the only cooking I do is to fill my lunch box. So yeah, I could totally use a new hobby, yeah.

In which I decide to honor my extroverted side’s need to be totally fucking antisocial.

Last week I had pretty rotten PMS. Emotionally I wasn’t all that much bitchier than usual, but I was as waterlogged as a long-dead corpse in a stagnant Midwestern pond and I decided to spend my weekend at home alone, where I couldn’t piss anyone off with my rotten, cranky attitude.

The Curse started Saturday morning and accordingly I spent all day in bed, except for a trip around the block with the dog and a brief dinner trip to Rosita’s for delicious chiles rellenos. I spent all day in bed Sunday, too, and never left the house once. Both days Teh BF dropped over briefly, but not long enough to piss me off.

I played with the Eee PC. A lot. I played with my new 20X External DVD Rewritable Drive w/Lightscribe, too, and my cell phone and my iThing. I watched Wall-E, the fourth Indiana Jones movie, the third Mummy movie, half of the X-Files movie, half of the Holy Grail, and about four episodes of Torchwood. I surfed for ebooks, yarn, and porn. I napped. I drank a latte. I finished Parable of the Sower and started Escapement.

It was lazy and decadent and, overall, just plain awesome.

I felt mildly sad leaving the house this morning, because it meant my weekend of self-imposed aloneness (which wasn’t all that alone, because G’ma was home and has no problems whatsoever just talking up the stairs at me) was over. But it was 11 degrees out even with the sun shining, and my sweet BF got up early on his day off just to drive me and the blue dog to work (I could have used the walk after all that lying around, but the dog probably would have gotten frostbite with her tiny little not-very-heeler feet) so that made me feel all special and loved and nice.

I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that perhaps a smidge of the sadness was actually at doing the right thing and leaving the beloved tiny notebook at home; I don’t really need to have it at work with me, but when I do I just can’t keep my hands off of it because it’s so hella adorable! and I don’t want to lose everyone’s permission to bring in their laptops occasionally by over-using the privilege.

Oh, yeah: in my defense, while I didn’t do laundry or get properly dressed or even bathe all weekend, I did clean the sink and toilet in the front bathroom. Poorly. But still! It’s something!

In which I’m a domestic goddess AND a rock star IN THE SAME DAY!

Cleaning

Not too terribly long ago I was standing in the shower and saw something on the wall. I reached up above the edge of the shower shell and smeared it with my finger, and it turned out to be dust. I left a big ol’ streak on the wall (because dust storms and condensation leave streaks on your latex paint, and that’s just that) and the next time I showered I stared at it I realized that it was driving me ape-nuts-batshit-crazy. I therefore determined to use my next day off for good, and vowed to wipe the walls down.

Holy shit! That’ll teach me to NEVER TOUCH A DAMP WALL AGAIN! I spent 3 hours Saturday morning cleaning the front bathroom! I scrubbed the walls, the ceiling, the fixtures, washed the valance, cleaned the mirror, washed the windows both inside and out… When I was done you could not only eat off any surface in there, you could have safely eaten the bathroom itself.

But at least there are no longer any streaks on the walls.

Or the ceiling.

Or anything else, by God! That bitch is spotless.

G’ma said, “You’re a good kid.”

Gigging

KJ left work early Saturday afternoon and picked me up at home. We stopped at the Taj on 2nd for gas then headed for Roosevelt, WA. The Gorge was all moody and foggy, and we got rained on a few times. We talked our faces off.

After two hours in the car, we rolled into a town that looked like this and went into a ‘venue’ that looked like this. We sat around crowd-watching (if you can call 32 persons ‘a crowd’) in the beer garden, listening to Junkyard Jane finish their set.

Investigation revealed that the only food within a 50-mile radius was the pork, beans, and coleslaw laid out on the bar… a bar that only served beer and no hard alcohol.

It should be noted here that I don’t really drink beer.

So, to recap: no food, no cocktails, 35 rednecks in attendance TOTAL, and a rainstorm coming up. The scene had Hell Gig written all over it. I was reduced to drinking Coors Light, of all things, and wondering why the bar couldn’t at least sell me a freakin’ bag of potato chips. KJ, the doll, worked his charm and managed to make the bar’s kitchen open up just long enough to produce a salad for me while we were setting up our gear, but that joy was short-lived because then it started to rain.

The band was under a shell, but I was all bummed because I was in BFE and I figured that the few people who were there were going to leave and we’d be playing in the rain for no one, but the folks from Roosevelt totally surprised me and stayed ’til the bitter end – half of them even danced in the rain!

Some biker dude got KJ half-crocked on moonshine out in the parking lot, and Syl befriended the town’s lesbian couple. The bartender brought me a free beer. No one requested any Janice Joplin. It turned out to be one of the best crowds ever! I ended up having a really good time, and would have counted it a lucrative gig if gas wasn’t freakin’ four bucks a gallon!

In Other News

The AC adapter for my laptop is bad, but I can buy a brand new one off of eBay for $20. I may be laptopping again soon!

My dog really thinks running water is cool.

I actually broke into my knitting bag for the first time in half a year and worked on the Big Brown Sweater. Superfine alpaca, bitches!

Sunday I made a falafel feast for G’ma and KJ and ate myself into a very happy stupor. Yum!

In which we prepare for Friday’s par-tay.

Saturday Bread and I went to town and had McDonald’s for breakfast. I know, I know. Don’t say anything.

Then we went to the vet’s and bought Frontline for the animals. Then we bought kibbles for the animals. Hundred and ten bucks right there. (Next time, we’re getting gerbils. I swear to God, three dogs and a cat’s a habit more expensive than drugs.) Then home.

I had a lunch date with NLW at noon-thirty, but I was totally late and the poor woman was starving when I got there. She fed me spinach pesto and we drank the six dollar bottle of wine I’d brought. Somehow during the course of the afternoon I spent sixty bucks on yarn, needles, and a pattern — I’ll be knitting this in a week or so. My first sweater! Hopefully starting it in May will mean I’ll actually be wearing it by next winter. (I’m still knitting the Fuzzyfeet my mother requested last Thanksgiving.)

I stopped at the store for a few things afterward and was home a little after five. Bread talked me into going back to town for the third time that day, and we ate dinner at the Dead Cock. It was slow in there, mellow and quiet. We watched South Park and went home.

Today I slept ’til ten. (Yes!) When I got up, Bread was doing laundry. Then we went to Nanner’s house, and Bread cooked breakfast. I have no idea why he cooked breakfast; he just did. He made asparagus, tomato, and onion omelettes with hash browns. It was awesome.

Nanner gave me an office chair. When we got home, I cleaned my office and the bedroom and swept the parts of the second storey that aren’t actually under construction. Bread brought my new chair in. IT ROLLS. I love it. It’s a totally legit office chair! It has arm rests and it’s adjustable and everything. It’s possible that I’ve never been happier about a chair in my entire life.

Amazon Blonde and Truck came out; Truck stayed here and AB and I went to ScrOttumwa to do our Cinqo de Mayo shopping at the big goddamned community-killer they call Super Wal-Mart. It’s so fuckin’ cheap I feel dirty — and not in a good way — whenever I go there: we bought a cart full of stuff and it only cost $66. And $22 of that was for the half-gallon of namebrand rum we’d bought!

I know their prices will pop back up to average after they’ve killed all the older, smaller grocery stores in town, but for now? You just can’t get shit cheaper anywhere else. (Plus their Mexican — excuse me, Hispanic — food selection is much broader than any of Fairfield’s stores.)

After shopping, AB and I stopped at the Tom-Tom Tap for cocktails and a gossip. It was lovely. Love the Tom-Tom.

Later, at home, I folded Bread’s laundry (in order to empty the dryer so I could wash and dry my own clothes) and Bread did the dishes. If the fucker’s not careful, I’m going to start believing him soon when he says he’s actually learned to be a decent roommate.

In other news, I had goblinbox moved over to the new server, but then Keef had an interaction with the new server’s support/billing departments that was so scary and wrong it just boded badly for the whole enterprise and he dropped that whole thing like it was hot and got a server elsewhere. So I have to move the whole goddamned site again, but it’s nine o’clock on Sunday night and I ain’t drivin’ to town to do it now, and I sure as hell ain’t doing it over dial-up from home.

In short, there may be outages tomorrow in goblinboxland. But rest assured, my babies, that mamma’ll be workin’ on it.

In which I discuss domestic issues.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve had a realization. An epiphany, if you will.

When Brett was working full-time and I was working part-time, I suffered from a great deal of guilt. I never felt like the house was clean enough, or like I was really working quite hard enough at it. Brett told me several times he’d be a much better househusband — that he’d have no problem keeping the place spotless.

Well.

This is Brett’s eighth week home. And while he has spent at least two weeks of that time logging and remodelling, that leaves four weeks — four weeks — during which he could have been doing housework.

He did some. He’s good at doing dishes; they never sit more than four days before he does them. *smirk* And he started taking the garbage out when I got home from work one night and informed him that the house smelled like trash. And he’s done quite a bit of laundry, even if he can’t seem to get it folded and/or put away. And he swept the stairs once.

But over all? The house is kind of a mess. There is random clutter everywhere, the livingroom’s been dusted once in two months, the furnace room (which fills up quite rapidly this time of year with ash and sawdust due to the woodstove) has been swept maybe twice and I did it once myself, and I don’t think the blankets and pillows from the couch have been washed at all. The counters are grubby, the shower hasn’t been cleaned, the sheets haven’t been changed, and there are shoes spread out all over the house.

None of this bothers me, per se. I don’t really give a shit if the house is clean or not, now that it’s not my job.

I’m just sayin’: the shit was way cleaner when I was home two days a week.

In which I migrate even more toward my ideal sleep schedule.

I’m a night person. I like to stay up late; I like to sleep in. I could happily go months without seeing the hours between dawn and eleven in the morning.

Lately it’s been getting worse and worse. For instance, after getting home from the gig last night I stayed up ’til three or so and then slept until one-thirty this afternoon. I probably would have slept longer, but Mr. B woke me up to go Xmas shopping (knowing full well, I think, that I had a rehearsal at three and that there was no way we could make to Iowa City and back in time). So I’ll be doing the shopping tomorrow and he’ll be getting out of it, the stinker.

So I’m staying up late tonight, rushing through some much-needed housework. I’ve got the trash ready to go out, and a load of laundry in, and the furnace room’s all cleaned up, and I’m about to do some sweeping.

In other news, House 11 rehearsal tonight rocked. This band is so hot! Not only are they all great musicians but I like them all. Our Sunday rehearsals run from 3:00 to 9:00 and we take a break at 6-ish for pizza, when we sit in PK’s living room and eat and talk and laugh and discuss things and it’s just so remarkably comfortable. Usually there’s at least one asshole in every band; some prima don/na you want to hold under water until s/he stops being annoying, someone who plays too loud, or is too bossy, or never practices, or can’t count to four, or tries to be the band leader when someone else already is the band leader… it’s just like a relationship but there are multiple people, all with their different goals and egos and issues. It can get extraordinarily complicated. But House 11? They’re universally adorable. I’m so pleased.

In which I have a suspicion.

Rehearsal last night rocked. I love this band. We ate an entire box of chocolates during the dinner break. (“We” being everyone but the bass player who didn’t have any chocolate at all.) Please note we’ll be playing the ballroom at the Best Western with Bambu on NYE and you should be there. I’m even going to buy new shoes for it.

After rehearsal I drove home and promptly fell asleep… which means I woke up at three in the morning. Then I slept from six ’til ten. My sleep schedule is toast.

In the war on domestic disorder, I’ve swept and dusted and tidied the house and carried laundry baskets up and down the damn stairs, and brought in wood and kindling, and started the dishes. (I hate doing the dishes, so I put them all in to soak in scorching hot water and never go back to finish them. Because I HATE them.) I scrubbed the toilet, which makes me wish to live in an all-female commune because the things that men do to toilets leave me shocked and irritated. I finished the dishes. I made enchiladas for dinner and key lime bars for dessert. I made myself a White Russian and drank it. I washed and folded two bushels of clothes. I opened the back door and swept all the leaves back outside where they belong.

It occurs to me that I could not be any more boring if I were clinically dead. (Which I might actually be; haven’t checked.)

And I hate being cold.

I think Nature’s just showing off with this 6-degrees-outside crap. We all know there’s really no reason to be that far below freezing. (Actually, it’s 23 degrees out right now. But it was 6 when I drove home from band practice Thursday night.)

I’m sitting here at my desk in my office drinking a rapidly-cooling latte and surfing Fictionwise for something to read in front of the fire. My office is cold.

Brett’s going to want me to do crap with him today, he’s got this list he wants to get through but as usual I don’t really want to do what he’s doing. I want instead to do some cosmetic housecleaning and go shopping and invite some people out for manicotti and too much wine for dinner.

Bread got up early and drove the dump truck to the dump. It had about six months’ worth of household garbage in it and, he says, most of it was frozen to the deck and he had to kick and shovel it to get it to slide out.

We live too far out in the middle of nowhere for garbage service, so we used to burn the majority of our garbage, composting the wet stuff and recycling the rest. Then Bread got tired of emptying the ash from the burn barrel, so we switched to throwing everything into garbage bags and into the back of the dump truck. My recycling and composting juju is gone – I’m a terrible world citizen and you should mock me. (It’s incredible how much garbage two people make in six months, when you can see it just piling up in the back of the dump truck. It’s sick. Literally.)

In other news, I haven’t brushed my hair since Thursday.

In which… ah, fuck it.

The entire point of yesterday’s post was to get Truck to comment. He did not. Bitch.

Today: I got up, cleaned house, meditated, napped, ate leftover enchiladas, and cleaned more house. I’ve done more laundry than you can shake a stick at. I got rid of the cat pee smell in the living room (but I honestly don’t know what did it – I just cleaned and/or vacuumed and/or laundered everything and now it’s gone). I swept. I dusted. I de-cobwebbed. I even scrubbed the tray under the dish drainer.

Outside it’s overcast and dreary. The leaves are turning stunning colors and then falling immediately to their deaths. Brett’s dog Stella has been lounging in my jeep since 1:30 and will not get out no matter what I tell her.

I’m going to town to buy groceries. I will probably have a cocktail first. As always, I love the word “cocktail.” Cocktail!

My dad will arrive sometime this weekend.