I feel like I keep wanting to just say the same things over and over again, but I'm sure new stuff must have been happening recently. Let me think...

-- Beany has discovered that the radiators get warm, and that a cat can nap on them. I don't know why somebody replaced all but two of my radiators with baseboard heaters. They don't work as well as the old radiators, they're unattractive, and instead of having one interesting-looking inconvenience per room, I'm unable to push furniture up against most of the walls. Dumb.

-- I picked most of my kale, since it's getting seriously cold outside now. I have a lot of kale to eat. Luckily, it's just about my favourite thing ever. As far as green veggies go, anyway -- but even that's a tough contest.

-- I bought this old medicine cabinet off ebay when I was living in London (here it is) and it was one of the many things I brought back with me. The door is hard to open, so I don't keep anything in there, because I'd pull it off the wall if I ever tried to get inside. Oh well.

-- I had one of the best baked sweet potato ever with my dinner tonight. I can't get enough of them. Delicious beta carotene.

After hitting the gym and putting in my hours at the coffee shop (reading submissions on my laptop) the other day, I ran to the supermarket for a few essentials (bananas and a -- gulp -- store bought tomato). Somehow I came home with these:

I got a box of Celestial Seasons 'Sugar Cookie' herbal tea (actually called 'Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride', but that's just too absurd). I can't quite say why I bought it, since I thought there was no way it would be good -- but I do actually like it. I also bought a bag of minty Hershey's Miniatures. Then I went home and enjoyed both of those things while listening to old Christmas records.

Oh, and I have towels with snowmen appliques in my kitchen. It's sick. I'm sick. I've become infected with the festive spirit, and I'm afraid I'll eventually melt into a pile of jolliness and pumpkin spice.

I spent quite a few years feeling totally indifferent towards this time of year, so it's hard for me to explain. I think it might be part of my psyche trying to resist the urge to simply fall into a slump as winter draws near. I'm sure I've mentioned it before (possibly more than once), but most of my friends agree that last winter was particularly hard, and we've all been dreading it coming around again. So I guess it's more pleasant to huff cinnamon and whistle Christmas tunes than to curl up in the fetal position. You know, given the choice.

I will say this, though -- I haven't turned into one of those crazy people who wishes for snow (yes! You ARE crazy if you like it.). And I'm waiting until after Thanksgiving to put up my sparkly, white, artificial tree.

Since Lisa asked so nicely, I present a picture of my thrifted skirt. Apologies if you don't care about clothes. . .

I'm wearing it right now, in fact. I've just finished at the gym and have installed myself in one of the overstuffed chairs at the coffee shop. I was going to read a submission, but then it occurred to me to update instead, so that's what I'm doing. Shhh.

Anyway, I've been having some good thrifting luck lately, it seems. Really, all that means is that I've been going to the thrift store more often -- the number of good finds you score is just a result of persistence, after all. Both the skirt and the shirt I'm wearing in that photo were originally from the Gap, and they were both only $3. As I noted on flickr, my tights and the t-shirt under the button-up are also from the Gap; they had several years where I was totally unimpressed with their clothes, but I'm sort of in love with them now. Do they still use, like, tiny baby monkeys to make their clothes?

I also found this tunic-y shirt yesterday for $4 (I think it's CK, if I'm remembering correctly). And I got a pair of jeans for $3 (from Hollister? I've never been inside one, because it looks like a Young Person's Store. I also can't go into Abercrombie & Fitch because the volume of the music.). They're not the most amazing jeans ever, but hey -- $3. They don't have to be.

I've always been more interested in thrifting housewares than clothes, to be honest. It just seems like so much work to sort through everything to find the good stuff, and if you shop the clearance racks at Target, say, you can find stuff for thrift prices anyway. But I've sort of realized that thrifting is a good way to get quality clothes that I wouldn't otherwise be able to afford.

I've also been playing around with making my own clothes. I mentioned a while back that I bought two big boxes of fabric from a yard sale for four dollars -- a lot of it is questionable, but it's been perfect for trying new things. Last week, I made a skirt out of denim-ish material. It's a heavier weight that a cotton shirting, but it's not proper twill, either. I didn't use a pattern; I traced around a simple drawstring skirt to get the proper angle for the sides, but it was all pretty freeform after that. It's got a zip in the back (which I did rather well, I have to say), and facings on both the waistband and the bottom hem. It turned out just like I imagined, which I can't say about all my clothing experiments.

-- Happy Sunday morning? I woke up at 4.00am exactly and wasn't able to fall asleep again. Why? There had better be a nap in my future, or I'm going to want to go to bed at, like, 8.00pm tonight.

-- I've been realizing little by little how tense I am. I mean, it's not a recent affliction; it's more that I've decided, 'Hm, that's not right. Or that. Or that.' For example: I bite the inside of my cheek when I'm anxious and lost in thought. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to find I've been doing that in my sleep, and I've got a painful cheek with temporary tooth impressions.

-- I reactivated my gym membership at the beginning of the month (I suspended it over the summer), so I've been getting back into that routine. I like to go mid-morning, shower afterwards, and eat lunch at a coffee shop while working on my laptop. The egg salad sandwich above is what I brought for lunch on Friday; the egg is from a free range chicken that a coworker of my mom's keeps, and the bread is homemade. I haven't been eating toast/bread all that much lately, but I had half a loaf in the freezer.

-- I went to Mill Ends the other day to look for skirt-making material, and I wound up walking out with a few yards of quilting fabric. Fabric stores are tricksy! I did, however, find a nice Gap skirt the next day at a thrift store. For three dollars. So perhaps it was for the best.

-- I'm going to see if the Sunday paper has arrived yet, so I can gather up coupons and go to the supermarket. Might as well do something if I have to be awake.

Bah, well, it was bound to come to an end eventually. No more sunshine and 70s for us -- it's been pretty bleak the past couple of days, and we had snowfall all this morning. Still, I've got these:

-- I was really surprised when these Brandywines ripened, as they were totally green and hard as rocks when I brought them inside. But after about a week on the window sill, they started blushing, and it seems like I just woke up one day and found them as red as you like. Tomatoes from the garden in November? Yes, please.

-- Everything that could possibly be said about Tuesday's election already has been, but -- oh, what a relief. The entire election day really had the feel of a national holiday to me. It helped that the weather was gorgeous, but it was also just the mood. Everybody at my polling place seemed so excited and happy (and I didn't have to wait in line). I decided to skip the free coffee and donut as A) I would have had to drive out of my way to get them and B) I didn't really want them when all was said and done. Instead, I made cookies.

-- I re-joined my gym (or unsuspended my membership) on the first of the month, and it's been a rocky start. The first day I went, I tried to do a bit of running, but I wound up hurting my leg again (the same place as when I was in Frankfurt -- luckily, the pain was gone by the next day). So the next time I went, I thought I would use a stationary bike, but because I have a funny shoulder, the regular ones aren't always so great. I tried one of the seated bikes, which was fine, except that when I sat down on it again today, I realized that the back of the seat had bruised my spine. I swear, sometimes I'm indestructible, and sometime I'm falling apart at the seams. It's a nuisance.

-- For the record, I do not like daylight savings time. It feels like it's at least ten at night, and. . . it's not. Thumbs down to time changes. Thumbs down to the tilt of the Earth.

Hello, can you say 'Indian Summer'? It must have been well over 70F today, and gorgeous as you like. Yesterday was similar, and Booty and I sat out on the lawn together after planting daff-o-dile bulbs (he opted to eat grass instead of pitching in with the planting).

-- Not to worry, though; our bad weather is on the way. They had been predicting storms for tomorrow, but it looks like they're now sticking with 'partly cloudy'. Good. I don't want any rain getting in the way of my master plan: cast my ballot for the good guy, then claim my free donut and coffee for having done so. It wouldn't be America if you didn't get a corporate prize for taking part in the democratic process.

-- Can you even believe how amazing the Honeycrisp apples are right now? I just had one for dessert; they're that good. Of course, I prefer the little ones I found at the Old Person's Grocery Store over the whompers they sell in the chain supermarkets, but I'll take what I can get. So sweet! So crisp! The king of apples.

-- The Old Person's Grocery Store, by the way, is the Thriftway Supermarket in Crystal. I found myself in its locale a number of weeks ago, because there's a Half-Price Books in the area. Enjoying both thriftiness and supermarkets, I decided to check it out, and I almost laughed out loud when I got inside. My laughter soon turned to concern when I started worrying whether A) the store instantly aged everybody who entered by fifty years or B) the same patrons had been trapped inside for half a century, as nobody can leave once they've gone inside, and I'd somehow missed the warning sign taped to the front door. We'll never know for sure, but I escaped unaged (beyond a few minutes, anyway).

-- I've discovered that Pandora is really excellent for listening to classical music. I have mixed feelings about using it for rock music -- we have differences in opinion as to what's 'similar' to what. But it's good when you want a bit of piano and some violins. The only problem is that I usually listen to classical music on vinyl, so every time a piece comes to an end, I get this uneasy feeling of needing to get up to flip the record. Technology is confusing.