Give me seven things you associate with October. You don’t have to explain them, but it’s more fun for readers if you do. from CafeWriting

1. Fallen leaves, strewn across the ground. I shuffle through them, or happily crunch them with my sneakered feet, while the dogs roll in them, noses all a-quiver. Ah, the smell of mulch in the morning.
2. Soups and stews, all simmering, filling the house with spicy warmth, living on the stove where one can sneak a bowl at odd hours, filling the stomach and the soul with warmth.
3. Crisp evenings, with woodsmoke in the distance and crystalline stars glittering in the heavens.
4. Chilly, mist-softened mornings that turn the grass a greener shade and allow your breath to form silly spirals when you speak into the air
5. Witches, ghosts, and goblins scampering down the street, accompanied by adults looking wistful for the days when they were the ones in costumes, and the chocolate didn’t have to be x-rayed before you could eat it.
6. Rain-slicked streets lit by lamplight, cars coming home in full darkness, glowing windows dotting the neighborhood.
7. Apples everywhere, red and green and yellow, like stoplights. Pressed into cider, baked into pies, stewed into sauce or boiled into jam – sweet, tart, crisp and redolent of fall.

Outside my bedroom window, fog dances above the surface of the pool, thick in some places, swirling streaks of thick and thin in others, misty and white and making the world feel chilly.

It is chilly. 59 degrees (F).
I had to turn on the heat last night, but this is mitigated by the fact that the temperature will creep toward 85 this afternoon, and I will end up turning on the a/c around 4 PM, but just for a little while.

* * * * *

The bed was too big last night, and I was cold, despite the warm bodies of Zorro and Miss Cleo. Why is it than when Fuzzy is home he is relegated to 1/8 of the bed, and there is never enough room, and when he’s gone there are vast acres of space, and too much?

I think there are weird bed physics that make the mattresses expand and contract depending on the number of occupants.

* * * * *

I’ve rediscovered radio. I go through phases when I hate noise, and stages when I want to surround myself with the spoken word. At times like this, I prefer radio to television because I can just listen to it, and don’t have to watch. I’m listening to NPR as I write this. Even when the news is bad, and nearly causes me to drop lead weights on top of the radio for delivering it, there is something comforting about NPR. It’s just so homey, unlike the ClearChannel clones that monopolize top-40 and even more alternative pop.

* * * * *

I am wearing a purple cotton tank top and my favorite purple, turquoise, and white “woof woof” pajamas. I like pajama bottoms, but prefer t-shirts or tank tops to traditional pajama tops. Always have.

* * * * *

I think it’s a morning for oatmeal and hot chocolate, rather than yogurt, toast, and coffee.

I love mail. Email is nice, snailmail is better. The nice thing about ordering stuff online, is that you get both – an email message telling you that whatever you ordered is en route, and then, just when you’ve had time to forget about the email, the actual item. The item, of course, is the best part.

Today I received an email message about some jewelry that I ordered, and a package from Possets, which comprised my first foray into non-BPAL perfume. I’ll do a rundown of the perfume later today (Tuesday), when I’m awake enough to sniff and analyze, but I have to say I love that Fabienne packs her perfume first into black satin bags, then into bubble wrap bags, then into lined envelopes.

And how can you not love a woman who names a perfume “froufrou” ?

Another happy surprise? One of my blog buddies gave my book blog an award. Watch that space for an announcement, because such awards are meant to be shared.

One final surprise? The wet grey day trickled into a cold night. Officially cold. When I took the dogs out for their evening elimination break, I could see breath in the air.

And I had to turn the heat on.

I love fall.
And happy surprises.

I’ve spent the evening curled up in the bedroom with two small dogs keeping me company, and a thunderstorm beyond the window. We slept late today, then I got up and puttered on my computer, cleaned the kitchen, and made a grocery list, and returned to bed because it was soft and comfortable, and sometimes you just have to have a completely lazy day.

Besides, the dogs are happier when we’re both in one location. It’s all about the dogs.

Last night, over a post-midnight snack of peanut butter on multi-grain toast and chilled apple cider, Fuzzy and watched an hour of Meerkat Manor on Animal Planet. I like the meerkats, because they’re small, fluffy, mischievous, and remind me of chihuahuas. Fuzzy likes the meerkats because he’s a closet ferret fan (we talked about getting ferrets when we lived in SoDak, but never did, which is good because we couldn’t have brought them to California with us).

Ferrets are legal in Texas, and I confess, I love them, too, but chihuahuas share terrier traits when it comes to small squeaky animals, and MissCleo’s part Staffie, and is pretty good at going to ground, so we can’t have them.

Anyway, we were watching the meerkats, and after Fuzzy saved me from accidentally enabling closed captioning, I found out that while I only watch the show when there’s NOTHING else on, he apparently knew it well enough to miss Flower, the previous matriarch of the Whiskers clan.

Me, I just wanted to know if meerkats were related to ferrets or not. (They’re not. Nor are they cats. They’re a variety of mongoose.)

Later, I had to explain to Fuzzy who Riki-Tiki-Tavi was.

Anyway, we slept away the day, napping, and talking and playing with the dogs, and then we got up, bought dog food, wild bird seed, and went for Chinese food (it wasn’t very good) and then grocery shopping, where I bought new measuring spoons to replace the ones that Fuzzy ran through the garbage disposal, but I noticed that the new sets no longer come with 1/8 teaspoon, and that’s one of the ones that were mangled.

Not that you should really have to measure 1/8 of a teaspoon. It’s just a pinch. Go with your instincts.

And then we came home.

And he packed for his trip tomorrow.

And I blogged, and watched the musical version of Legally Blonde (again) and am now watching the original movie, and soon, very soon, we will turn out the lights and sleep.

Which is fine.
Because it’s been an easy Sunday.
And sleep really is the best way to end one of those.

I’ve been watching the second-season DVD’s of Forever Knight this week, and really enjoying the commentary from James Parriot, Geraint Wyn Davies and Nigel Bennett, especially the latter.

Bennett, in commentary, seems to be enjoying the show as much as his character, Lucien LaCroix ever enjoyed biting into a pretty girl’s neck, and his insights go beyond things like direction and casting to talking about things like how the crew used to like keeping the camera angles off-level (he called it “wonkizing” – making everything wonky) and how they seemed to enjoy lighting just little bits of his face during the radio booth scenes where he would be uttering a Nightcrawler monologue.

He also mentioned that when the show was canceled, they auctioned off the set pieces, and he now owns three of the torch lamps from the alternate version of Natalie’s apartment used in the Alice in Wonderland tribute episode, “Curiouser and Curiouser.”

Is it wrong that I enjoy the commentary more than the actual episodes, sometimes?

In my studio, I have turned the closet doors into my “inspiration wall” where I hang things that make me smile, motivate me, remind me that even though writing is an insular job, there is still a world beyond my doors that I must take the time to actively participate in.

It changes as the seasons change, currently sporting a collection of blank cards I bought when they were first sold at Barnes and Noble, post cards from friends, engagement announcements from friends and family that I found prettier or more interesting than conventional formats, a calendar, a couple of bumper stickers, and a gift bag full of…stuff…on each door knob (one has a collection of post-it note pads gleaned from years in the mortgage industry – never turn away free post-its).

I glance at the inspiration doors, and never think to comment on the symbolism of them being, you know, doors.

But I guess there’s some deeper meaning there, after all, beyond a glossy white surface waiting to be filled.

MissCleo’s bark alerts me to movement, not within our house, or even on our property, but on the sidewalk across the street. The sounds of another dog yipping, a man hushing it, a babyish giggle, waft through my open door, and I move from the kitchen to peer out the dining room window.

We live in a walking neighborhood. Tree-lined safe streets, where kids play basketball or street hockey in their driveways, and enthusiasm for holiday decorating are two of the things that struck me as positive when we were looking for our house. At any given daylight or twilight moment, someone is out walking.

Early mornings, the parade of dogs on leashes comes down the street, each one happy for their fifteen or twenty minutes of time outside the ubiquitous six-foot-tall wooden privacy fences that shield our back yards. Midmorning, the older women. Not OLD old, just older-than-me (less so every year) in their bermuda shorts and white sneakers, waling in pairs, and often sporting tennis visors or straw hats adorned with flowers.

Afternoons, and sometimes weekend mornings like today, bring the young parents. Mothers pushing strollers are common during the week, while today MissCleo has me noticing the guy across the street, dragged by his dog, carrying his child in one of those hands-free baby slings, enjoying the day despite the overcast sky.

No doubt his wife is enjoying a few minutes of time free of both child and football.

It’s a grey day outside my windows, but it’s not the grey of an impending storm so much as a day that seems somehow muted, shrouded. Or maybe that’s just how I’m choosing to see the world, today.

I came home from a day of beautification and book-browsing to an email informing me a cousin had died. I didn’t have a particularly close relationship with her; she is my mother’s generation, after all, and while I’m sad for her family, I also know she’d been fighting serious kidney disease, in and out of hospitals, for much of her life. Her death is an end to that, and end to her pain and her struggle. If death can be a balm, this one is.

She did not “pass” and she is not “gone,” and we did not “lose” her. I hate those words. She was not taking a test, she remains very much present in our hearts and minds, and she is not an object to be misplaced like a stray ring of keys. I hate that people are afraid of death. In the garden of life, as in any garden, there has to be death to complete the cycle. A flower must start from a seed, bloom, grow, wither, die, and return to the soil to offer nutrients to the next flower.

Mind you, I don’t think we should actively seek death, except in the case of terminal illness, because it seems to me that to do so is to give up.

I don’t believe in giving up.

But I do believe that sometimes you have to rest, and today, I see the grey sky as a resting state.
Soft clouds.
Balmy breeze.
A hint of coming change.
A whisper of winter far down the road.
Pencil strokes of thoughts, rather than bold declarations in fat black ink.

Grey.

The thing about all the writing about cars that I do for work is that it’s turned me from someone who knew the difference between an SUV and a sub-compact, and was capable (if not always willing) of changing a tire, or even changing oil, into someone who actually notices different makes and spouts trivia about them.

“Oh, that’s an Audi A4,” I said, when one appeared in a movie we were watching, “I just wrote an article about how Audi and BMW are using torque vectoring to enhance their stability control systems.”

Fuzzy finds this a bit annoying, and frankly I don’t blame him, so when we came across a vintage 1971 Mustang in the parking lot of Albertsons a few weeks ago, fully restored and sporting a FSBO tag with an asking price of only $7500, I didn’t mention the 2002 Mustang we’d passed on the way to the store, and I didn’t talk about how the new neo-classic muscle cars were way spiffy, but less desirable than the vintage models.

I just said, “Wow, too bad we don’t have the spare cash for this.”

He looked at me a little dubiously. “You’d never let me have this car,” he said.

“No…but I’d let US have it.”

Sometimes, I think I frighten him.