Halloween season is craziness, but it's fun anyway. Costume days are awesome. Today was supposed to be pirate day, so I walked in with a black'n'white striped tank top under my tattered-ruffled black jacket, dark chain necklace full of crosses and coins, and a pirate hat.

Behind the front registers were a whole swarm of Disney princesses.

...fortunately, one of my bosses was a pirate, and everybody else was whatever they felt like. I snagged one of the rental pirate costumes, and added some bits: a purple'n'black striped corset (striped the opposite direction that my tank top was, but it still worked somehow), purple'n'black striped head scarf, aaaand the most amazing skirt EVER, which I forgot we had. Long, black, with chunks of lace, mesh, and solid fabric all patchworked together, with a jagged-edged bottom. Awesome.

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Since everyone else at the store has been bringing in cookies like every week, I figured I'd chip in. Last night, I spotted a recipe for Spooky Witches Fingers, and decided THAT WAS IT OMFG. So I made a whole stack of them, skipping the green food coloring (used a bit of whole wheat flour in with the generic stuff, which made it a bit more fleshy-looking), and used the raspberry jam route instead of the red icing (since that meant assembly happened all at once). They looked AMAZING - and tasted surprisingly delicious! (Probably helps that I always throw in more vanilla than is called for...the real stuff isn't usually in my budget, I figure the fake stuff is probably a bit less potent.) Everyone at work was spazzing over them, Ann especially, and Mac asked for the recipe. YAY I win.

...though more of a win is the real food I made yesterday. This Apple-Sausage Rigatoni? Amaaaaaaazing. I'm on such a fall-food binge. I sifted through some soup recipes over on Better Homes & Gardens' site tonight, and I have a good dozen to try (with a few of Heidi's in there too). I should probably find out what kind of soups Tom likes... (Not that it will hinder my soup-making. Tom eats fast food half the time anyway, when left to his own devices. I will eat my soup.)

I also tried some wine biscuits, out of my King Arthur cookie bible, but I'm not entirely satisfied with the results. They'd be better more biscotti-like than mine turned out, and I think there may actually be too much wine(!?!) in them. May also be that the red wine I had was a smidge strong - drinkable for me, but not all that great, which is why I was willing to part with half a cup for cookies. Also...they are NOT pretty little cookies. They didn't puff up or round out aaaany in the baking, so they're the same ugly little scraggly lumps they began as. (One of these days, I will pay attention to how baking soda/baking powder/eggs make things puff up/not puff up, and to what degree.) Also they are a tanned purple in color, which is disconcerting.

In other cooking news: we had an AMAZING dinner...last Monday? Monday before? whenever I last worked 9-5, and Tom didn't work at all. We thought we'd take advantage of having a normal human being evening, and actually have a nice sit-down dinner. I'd been trying to think of a main course to suit the little red potatoes I'd picked up, and had been a bit stuck. Tom has been talking steak fairly often lately. He didn't see the sort of steak he'd had in mind when we went to Tops for supplies, but, we wound up with a pretty awesome menu:

- mixed baby greens salad (which Tom wrinkled his nose at, because the leaves still had stems! oh horror! ..it was insanely delicious)
- Garlic Red Potatoes
- steak, with blue cheese on top, wrapped in bacon (which I'm pretty sure has an actual name, but Tom forbids me to look into this, since he wants to be able to claim credit for inventing it)
- really, really delicious dry red wine (yay! we're grown up enough to like (the occasional) dry red wine!)

...the potatoes, despite cooking for absolutely ages, were a smidge under-done. The steak, despite Tom's constant poking, was a smidge over-done. Didn't really matter a bit. :)

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What else is new... I went to the hospital, at the family planning clinic nurse's suggestion, and got a thyroid test taken. The day I was going to call the clinic to find out the results...I got my bill in the mail. x_x Which means I need to start figuring out how to get it paid for - the clinic said they'd be covering it, but I'm not sure how to make the paperwork know that. At which point I remembered that I canNOT, not, EVER, navigate the phone directory for the clinic. The options make no sense, I can't ever figure out which extension I'm supposed to be heading toward. Last time I wound up calling into what I think was child protective services...which is obviously not what I was looking for. (Note: this is NOT just me. A coworker assured me that she has the same problem every time she calls.) So, I'm thinking Monday morning, since I am not working, I'll gather up all my paperwork and troop down to the clinic, and ask them what I'm supposed to be doing - and ask them what the heck my thyroid is up to.

...as much as I enjoy being a generally healthy person, there's a bit of me that almost hopes there *is* something off with my thyroid. It would explain a lot of the random issues I have, including the fact that I'm always so damn tired. (Eight hours of sleep last night, probably more like nine. Alarm at 11:20 yanked me from a DEEP, deep sleep, smack in the middle of a dream, and I had to battle all morning to keep moving.) Plus the spotting (so far continuing, despite the new birth control), and the migraines (which may be linked to female cycles - I'm diligently plotting every weird thing that might possibly be related to hormones on my calender now, to see what correlations there might be). wheeee.

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I'd forgotten how freaking fast I read. I've been doing audiobooks for ages, but going through L.M. Montgomery's Anne books...there are several Librivox hasn't done yet. So, thank you Project Gutenberg - both the general and Australian sites, I snagged .txt versions of the books I needed. Flung them onto Tom's Kindle, and discovered that the sucker really *is* great for reading on. The screen does not glow, so there's no eyeball issues. Battery life is insanity (I haven't plugged it back in for like two whole books, and it's still only half down). Text size is ADJUSTABLE - so it's tiny and there's lots to a page when I'm reading normally, and I can make it bigger when I'm reading while crocheting (yes this is possible - sick, but possible) or washing dishes (shhh don't tell Tom I had it near water!). The other plus? YOU DON'T HAVE TO HOLD THE BOOK OPEN!!! I'd never even thought of that, until I started flying through the Anne books. All my actual, physical L.M. Montgomery are those little travel-sized 5x7-ish paperbacks that are like two inches thick. And they are SUCH a pain to hold open, whether you're trying to pin it under something, or using your hand, it just *hurts*. Kindle? Flat. Tap the side to turn the page. (Can tap on EITHER side to turn the page forward, even.)

Anyway, commercial aside... I remember when I first read Anne of Green Gables. Pretty sure it was when I had chicken pox in third grade. I'd always put off reading it, because the print was the tiiiiniest I'd ever seen in my life, and it was a really thick book. Chicken pox gave me a lot of time on my hands. This time around? I think some of the later books are shorter, but, honestly, maybe two days, and that was with maybe half a day of solid reading, mainly just the four hours between me getting home and Tom coming home.

So I'm audiobooking the last original Anne book (looks like there's a compilation that was published after her death, which doesn't seem to be public domain yet), but I wanted to get some more things to *read*. I had a few things sitting around on my computer, and I've a few more things in mind. I'm trying to ingest anything that might possibly inspire ideas for NaNoWriMo next month - so, ghost stories, maybe some religious things, anything set in gardens, Victorian-era things, and the cozy sort of girly classics that just make me happy. I just realized I have an audiobook of Louisa May Alcott's "Flower Fables", which I'm super-excited to dig in to. Probably going to re-read L.M. Montgomery's "Magic for Marigold", or maybe one of her others - I absolutely love her dreamy-eyed young girls, full of imagination and seeing beauty in every tiny thing around them. Trying to hash into consumable form "An Adventure", which is the book of "The Moberly-Jourdain incident" - these two scholarly women seeing ghosts around Versailles, of Marie Antoinette and others... it's such an incredibly detailed account, from these two insanely credible people, it's really grabbed my fancy. The full text is in pdf online, but... the pdf is embedded into a website in some totally absurd way, and all I could do was save it one page at a time. I just tried compiling them into a multi-page pdf...but I'm not even sure if the Kindle will take pdfs. I think it will? I don't even know. But, the book is ghosts and gardens and faded royalty and kindred spirit women at the turn of the century. Totally worth a bit of work.

Wikipedia, by the way, is so awesome for linking to the Project Gutenberg copies of books that turn up in articles. I always forget to check the Australian Project Gutenberg, and they have all sorts of things the main site doesn't, though in a less-searchable manner. Via that, I tracked down "The Well of Loneliness", which I'd been dying to read - generally considered the first lesbian novel in English, and caused all sorts of legal furor and was banned and everything else...even though there's no blatant sexual content or much of anything besides vague insinuation. But I like vague insinuation and subtle undertones and things. Just started in, and so far, I actually really like it - I've gotten as far as: a little girl is born when the parents expected a boy, so they name her Stephen, and she's developing rather male characteristics and personality quirks, hates dresses, has a crush on a serving maid... but it's all handled in such a way that... I'm not even sure how to describe it. It's handled in a very believable way, just day-to-day things, like she plays dress-up, but dresses up as a soldier... but the undertones are almost mystical, like there's a weird element of predestination, you have the sense that she's developing this way not so much due to a quirk in her genes, but because she was conceived and developed in the womb while being thought a boy. It's feeling very like the "Rose of Versaille" anime, which I adore, so it's all good.

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One of our hamsters died. :\ We knew they were nearing the end of their typical lifespan, so Tom, darling that he is, has been sure he's the first to go poking into their cage lately when we go to clean it out. This time... he told me to stay outside the room awhile. I can't even say how grateful I was for this, I really don't think I could have handled it, Tom barely could. He said it looked like they'd been in a fight (they'd always fought a bit now and again)... and I'm sure it wasn't a pretty sight. I *am* a little sad, even though we've never been overly-attached to the critters - hamsters don't really have a whole lot of personality to get attached to. Still, it was sad.

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Our ceiling in the kitchen, which has had cracked plaster for ages, finally started dripping about a week ago. Poking around in the bathroom, we discovered that the seal around the tub is totally shot. Soooo, as long as the shower curtain is plastered to the wall at that end, and we keep a towel on the floor for back-up, it doesn't leak, so that works.

We have been doing, in small doses, major house-cleaning. A few weeks ago I tackled the tub hardcore, and the leak issue motivated me to clean the scary corner between the shower and the radiator. The whole town has been invaded by something like fruit flies, and they are driving me COMPLETELY FREAKING INSANE, so that motivated a hardcore cleaning of the kitchen sink. (Note: didn't help. There do seem to be a few more of the damned things when I have cookie-batter bowls in the sink, but no matter how clean things are, the flies are still there. Tom can catch the pests in mid-air, so that helps, but I can't, and they make me insane, so boo.) I bought a mop! I'd been seeing ads for the Swiffer version of a mop, and that struck me as a perfect solution for the apartment. My kitchen floor? like 3x7'. My bathroom floor? probably like 3x3'. Tiiiiiny scraps of floor. I'd been tackling them the old-school way, on my knees with a sponge, there's really no room for a full-on mop situation. But WalMart had the Swiffer things - and, for a few bucks less, a Clorox version, which is what I got. It works AWESOME. I was a little skeptical, it's basically glorified paper towel, but... one towel thing got me through 90% of my kitchen, including the scary bits under the stove and fridge. Whatever liquid is in the little sprayer (I am probably saner not knowing) is pretty amazing stuff.

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And, still crocheting. One Christmas present: DONE!, once I fix the lazy way I tried blocking it. Another Christmas present: DONE!, once I block it. Another Christmas present: ohgodSOCLOSEtodone, but I need the attention span to go back and work on the edging. Another Christmas present: started and... well, let's just say a glove that doesn't fit my hand is not going to be very useful for anyone not a lot younger than me. Nearly everything is planned, I just have to scrounge up the money for yarn, and settle on a few patterns. The main trouble is, is that since these are gifts for people important to me, I want to do the best I can. Which means, in some cases, waaay more expensive yarn than I would use for myself. I have a little throw blanket in mind for one family member, and I found the *perfect* yarn, in just the colors and texture I want, and even in an alpaca blend, which I hadn't dared hope for but wanted desperately (since it's sooo lightweight for how crazy warm it is)... but it's like $8 a skein. So I'm trying to figure out how to get as much blanket out of as little yarn as I can, but I'm soooo bored with every freaking throw blanket pattern being either V-stitches or giant granny squares. I like both well enough, but, I've done those, I want something else!

I'm a little scared, given that there's a lot of crocheting that should be done in November, when I'm going to have a novel to crank out...

Labels: apartment, books, cooking, crochet, health, work