1. I had a good old -fashioned sick day on Tuesday. Having a home office means that even when I feel less than 100%, I usually end up logging on and working for the day, simply because the commute is manageable – if I can make it down the hall, I usually feel like I should get to work. But Tuesday I had a migraine of the sort that I haven’t had in a few months, with dizziness and difficulty focusing. I slept all morning, woke up and ate some lunch, and then went back to sleep. By evening, I was feeling a bit better, and by bedtime I felt the relief of impending normalcy. I felt a little guilty for taking the day off but it was the right thing to do.
2. We’ve officially started our month-long “21 Days of Halloween” horror movie marathon. This concept was born a few years ago when I felt disgust over the “25 Days of Christmas” schlock on some Hallmark or Lifetime channel and decided to spend the month of October swimming in the macabre. I quickly realized that 31 days of horror movies – and then 25 days of horror movies – were unsustainable for a healthy mental outlook. 21 days is a sweet spot of reveling in the morbid and decayed whilst still maintaining a productive and optimistic energy level for day to day social adjustment. I’ve decided not to do the periodic posts of detailed reviews of our viewing and will instead post a list of our full viewing for the month on Halloween, along with a few starred reviews. So far, I’ll tip you off that we seem to be favoring the 1970’s horror genre which means heavy on the moody and atmospheric (albeit slow-moving) narratives.

3. We decorated the lawn – Miss L did a nice graveyard of styrofoam tombstones yet I could not bring myself to take down the Biden sign so perhaps sending the wrong message? The same day this photo was taken, the wind picked up and blew most of the tombstones over so I have to go back to the drawing board with embedding them more firmly – any tips?

4. The hummingbird feeder is finally down, washed, and stored for the winter. I have fallen in the the rhythm of refilling the feeders and birdbath every morning (after nightly deer and raccoon raids). I can usually hear the chickadees in the trees waiting for me to finish up, flitting with delicate and inquisitive flutters and sawlike calls, but the other morning it was an entirely different sound in the neighbor’s tree – a restless, shifting organism made up of a hundred birds. I was barely inside when the dark cloud descended on the feeders like a gang of rowdy drunks at a free bar. European starlings – probably 150 of them, and it only took them a few minutes of tussling and gorging to clean my feeders out. There were a few more the following day, but I think they’ve finally moved on, to the relief of my typical crowd of sparrows, cardinals, titmice, jays and finches and cardinals.

5. I’m still working on my Halloween socks but had a setback this week. I’d turned the heel and was working on the gusset and feeling not happy with the heel flap, which was done in-pattern (the Minecraft sock pattern by Heather Cox, available on Ravelry). In addition, by time I started on the gusset, I had somehow forgotten that the pattern was written for circulars and I was using double-pointed needles. This resulted in mistakes and so I had to rip back anyway, so I decided spontaneously to rip the flap all the way back and instead of doing it in-pattern, replace it with a simple slip-stitch heel flap. I think I’m going to like this better but I did lose a couple of days on it.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. I’ll be busting on my socks, taking lots of naps, and reinforcing my tombstones against gusty autumn breezes.

Obligatory reminder to vote blue: it’s good for the economy, according to Moody’s and Goldman Sachs, and reduces the likelihood that your governor will be the target of a domestic terrorist extremist kidnapping plot!