Foggy Morning Breakdown

It’s just before work time on a Tuesday morning. The trees outside my office window are just starting to turn to fall colors, and the whole scene is hazy with what remains of a thick, dense fog bank. (Our shower radio assured me that it would burn off quickly and that the rest of the day will be clear and bright and nearly 80 degrees, so I’m psyched.)

We ran out of milk and rice-milk over the weekend and haven’t been back to the store since then, so I’m eating my morning cereal with chocolate rice-milk on it. It’s not bad (makes me think of some vegan hippy cousin of Count Chocula who wears a lot of hemp jewelery) but I don’t think I’ll be making a habit of it. I’d have gone to the store last night, but Kate got stuck at work until 9:30, and I hit a burst of work-productivity in the late afternoon and rode it through the quiet evening until Kate got home. So no milk yesterday.

We’ve had several sets of visitors in the past couple of weeks, most notably Kate’s parents, Luke, Lindy, and Sabrina this past weekend. Nobody keeled over from cat allergies, we hiked Mt. Cardigan on a gorgeous warm fall Sunday along with a thousand small children and their entourages, John cooked an awesome autumn meal Saturday night, and I braised some brussel sprouts with mustard and cider and made two marginally cosmetic pies (apple/ginger and Nodaberry) which I was fairly pleased with (though I needed less tapioca in the blueberry – some tapioca helps prevent the pie from turning soupy, but too much starts becoming noticeable). A minor squabble with Kate just before Saturday’s dinner followed by some disagreements about cooking choices put me slightly off my game all evening despite the great food and company, and it took a little decompression after the socializing was done to get back on an even keel. Kate said she couldn’t tell I was feeling fractious, which I suppose is a blessing and a curse; a blessing not to be a drag on the rest of the evening, but a curse to habitually lock it all inside my head and need to vent it later. An ex used to try to get me to just yell when I was angry, to fume and sputter or say whatever cranky things were on my mind without meticulously examining them for rationalities and reasons, first, but I never really took to it.

Sunday’s hike was mostly for fun and partially for me to continue breaking in my hiking boots and Kate to start breaking in her digital camera, which her family and I presented to her at dinner as an early birthday present. On the honeymoon front, we’ve purchased our tickets from LA to and from New Zealand, and we’ve purchased our tickets from Manchester to and from LA. We came back from a really fun day trip down to visit Deb and Ryder and Hayden several weeks ago carrying lots of books about New Zealand, where Deb and Ryder honeymooned, so we’re feeling much more prepared than we were before. Next steps: making reservations for things in-country.

(Oh, and the other visitors I referred to above were a pair of dogs who came trotting by the house unaccompanied a couple of weeks ago. A gorgeous Rottweiler (named “Bulldog”) and a German Shepherd (named “Jacks”), both fairly social, both with Grantham tags but no phone numbers. We ended up calling the local police, who called Grantham’s police, who knew the dogs and their owners. We entertained the dogs for a bit before their owners showed up to sheepishly collect them. Fun little visit. We’re still considering fostering a dog, but not until after the honeymoon at the earliest, and probably not until spring.)