Well, we’ve officially declared it open season on Halloween candy at our house. We got out the candy cauldron. Four bags of candy from Sam’s Club just about filled it up. We got Wonka Mix-Ups, a gummi mini hamburger/hotdog/etc. mix, a bag of Hershey’s Nuggets of various kinds, and a miniature chocolate bar assortment. I want to add fun-size Pez and giant Lemonheads at some point too. And right before Halloween, I want to get some Christmas nougats (Sam’s already has them) and dump a few of those in. Just because I think it would be funny. We’re also going to do a second “cauldron” this year just for the party, with Lindt truffles and Ghiradelli squares and probably some liquor-filled chocolates in it. The kiddies don’t get that stuff.

I’m making an attempt at decorating for fall/Halloween. Unfortunately I don’t have many ideas yet. I got a leaf garland from Michael’s to go around the candy cauldron, and some potpourri (or however you spell it) to simmer, and that’s about it so far. I think I want to get (or make, but probably get because I’m lazy) a fall-themed wreath for the door. I don’t know what else to do, really.

Except for the candy cauldron. I know how I want to do the treatment of that for trick-or-treat. We’re probably going to be hosting the party again, in our garage-turned-rec-room with the overhead door open, and I imagine the candy cauldron will be at the front on a table again. I want to drape the table in black, and then decorate it in a harvest theme. Leaves, small gourds and/or fruits, that sort of thing. Maybe a few candles in a brown or burnt orange kind of color–not the typical Halloween black. I’ll assemble all this slowly over the next few weeks.

I still don’t know what my costume will be. I could wear my ren faire dress again, and do the gothwitch thing, but I did that last year and I want something different. Also, I don’t really feel like showing that much flesh again this year, but then the neckline is somewhat adjustable, so that’s only sort-of a problem.

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I think I have found the world’s most addictive substance. It’s officially Pez. I really, really need to stop lest I exceed my calories for today (especially as Dad had to back out of walking today), but the tub of fun-size is just sitting there unguarded, and eating them only makes me crave more… And yes, I have no self-control today. Eeeek.

At least they’re only 35 calories for every two fun-sized rolls. Not that that helps much if you’re eating them in quantity.

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Yeah, I know. Those of you who know me are probably running for cover. Actually, this isn’t really going to be too much of a rant. A minor one here or there, I guess, but not bad.

I went clothes shopping (some with Tim and some without) this past weekend. Usually this is a big trial for me; I’m always out of step with fashion, people don’t like designing clothing for tall women, etc., etc., etc. But this time it wasn’t too bad. I mostly had fun, really.

I do have two gripes I’d like to get out of the way. First of all, a specific one directed at Old Navy: What the hell is up with the women’s section? I know it’s not just that this is what Old Navy does, because the men’s section has perfectly sensible clothing. But everything in women’s has to be “cute”. Even simple polo-type shirts have cutsie little animals embroidered on the breast. It’s stupid. What I would like, please, is a garment that acknowledges that I am feminine without screaming “girly girl” to anyone who looks at it. Simple, clean designs in plain colors (by which I don’t mean “pink and purple”, either), cut to flatter the female figure. Second, in general: What is it with pastels? Going into winter, I’d normally expect darker colors to dominate the available selection, but it seemed like everywhere I went it was all pastels, all the time.

That out of the way–I did have fun. Tim bought a bunch of plain-color V-neck short sleeved shirts on clearance at Old Navy for, like, $3 each. (I grabbed one too, in black.) I found a cute Halloween shirt, a black one with a witch flying across a full moon, stardust trailing from her broom, the word “Wicked” under the stardust. I also got a button-down shirt with three-quarter-length sleeves in a soft sage color. (By this time I’d realized that black was taking over my wardrobe and thought I ought to get something else.) And…

Khakis. That fit. And I didn’t have to order them. Oh. My. Gods. I was not really holding out any hope that they would, but I needed to find out what waist size I wear now that I’ve lost all that weight so that I could order khakis that do fit. So I tried on a pair of 14 longs–and was amazed to find that they did fit. They’re just a smidge shorter than I’d like normally, but I think they’ll be OK, particularly in professional situations where you don’t want lots of fabric spilling all over your feet. They were on sale for $21.99. You better believe I snapped them up.

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Tim showed me something on my iPod the other night that I hadn’t seen before. It’s a music quiz. The Pod chooses a song from your library randomly, and you get a clip of it taken from a random spot in the song. Its title and four others (also randomly chosen) display onscreen and you have to choose the correct one. The longer you wait, the more wrong answers disappear from the choice list, and the fewer points you get. It’s insanely addictive. I did 100 songs last night, got 96 right and a score of like 59K, I think.

The guys at work have discovered the best. Halloween candy. Ever. It turns out Pez comes in fun size–about half the size of a regular roll. Six cute, sugary little candies each. And every two fun-sized rolls only have 35 calories between them. The guys have been kind enough to share.

The new tat is somewhat fit for photographing; it’s healing pretty well. It’s a little raggedy right now, since the scabbing is beginning to come loose. Not nearly as irritated and ugly as I thought it would be while it was healing, though. I’ll try to remember to take a picture soon. It’s just such a bother–downside to having a fancy camera, I guess. One of my co-workers was very surprised at how cleanly it was healing, because back when he had his done he left the bandage on for like 4 days and it was still oozing and stuff. Yes, well, that’s why you get them done in licensed tattoo parlors in the States, not in some backalley shack in the third-world country you’re stationed in, isn’t it?

I’ve begun to notice my weight loss in an odd place: My hands. My rings don’t fit so well anymore. My wedding and engagement rings had to be resized when I was gaining weight because they were too small; the tightness was causing some blistering. Resized them, everything was cool. Now they’re too large, and the friction from them slipping around all the time is causing the same skin irritation! I may have to resize them back down again, I don’t know. The rings I wear on my pinkies are way too loose; the one from my left hand, in fact, fits comfortably on either ring finger. The one on my right hand almost does. It’s a little tight on the ring finger yet. Oddly, the one I wear on my right ring finger has never needed resized, and doesn’t now. When Aunt Diane gave it to me for Confirmation in eighth grade, it fit perfectly. Eleven years and probably seventy pounds later, before the diet, it fit perfectly. After having lost thirty pounds, it still fits perfectly. I’m not sure what’s going on there.

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This morning when we went out to the car, Tim and I noticed that there was fog actually visible between us and the street; the house across the way even looked pretty hazy. And, I mean, it’s not like we just have a yard that big or anything.

So this morning I get in to work and start doing stuff, and I realize WeatherFox has a severe weather warning up. I check it and… Dense Fog Advisory.

…no. Really? You don’t say. I hadn’t noticed that we could barely see the car in front of us on the drive down here! Thank you for informing me that there’s dense fog out there!

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It’s not October yet, but it’s already Halloween time. Everything’s starting to come out in the stores–well, it did so about Labor Day. The days are getting cooler and shorter. This has happened, this year, with alarming speed; very nearly literally one day it was sunny and 80-90 F, and the next day it was overcast and the temperature had dropped, like, fifteen degrees. Thursday or Friday we could still see the sunrise when we left the house for work; Monday it was just a hint of pink to the east, and otherwise the sky was dark.

I’ve even had my requisite bag of Brach’s Autumn Mix (two kinds of candy corn plus mallowcreme pumpkins), so it must be that time of year again. Time for horror movies, time for costumes. Time for pumpkins and gourds and those cute little things you attach to trees to make it look like a witch on her broomstick flew straight into it. Time for changing leaves and bigger and bigger gaps inbetween lawn-mowings. Time for CANDY.

Ah, nostalgia… I remember when we used to go Trick-or-Treating. For a large stretch of our childhood, Andrew and I lived in an actual subdivision, with neighbors and everything. It was solid gold come Halloween. We wandered around the neighborhood, just the two of us as I recall, with maybe some friends, and rang every single doorbell we could find that came with an accompanying lit porchlight. And we got some prayer tracts–I still remember which house, if you can believe that–and a few raisins, but we also got a relatively huge haul. What I can’t quite remember is what we went as… I think I recall that the year after we moved away out into the country, when Mom brought us both back for one last year, I might have been Laura Ingalls. Which seems exceptionally strange because I was in eighth grade at that point, and it really should have been my very last year ever, and I hadn’t read Laura Ingalls in ages, but there you have it.

Fifth grade… That one I remember particularly. I wasn’t anything that year, because I wasn’t home to be Trick-or-Treating. The University owns a sort of camp, halfway to Indianapolis. Every year the county’s fifth-grade students pack their bags, roll up their sleeping bags, and endure the ride on a school bus to the camp, where they spend a week with their teachers and various counselors, doing sort of summer-campy educational activities. But during the school year. It happened that the week my class was scheduled to go included Halloween. They put on a dance for us, but I’d never liked dances in the first place. I’m not a social adult; I was never a social kid either. I dutifully trudged down there with the rest of the class, though, and ate the cupcakes and probably drank whatever punch they had, and generally sat there being miserable that I was missing out on the usual Halloween fun. It was the low point in an otherwise fun and exciting week. When I got home, though, I was presented with a Trick-or-Treat bag full of candy! It turned out that Andrew had gone Trick-or-Treating for two, just to make sure I had my own haul. Of course, I found out years later that Mom and Dad had put him up to it, but–hey, who cares. I had candy.

More ramblings to come, I’m sure, as Halloween approaches…

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OK, two posts in one morning, I know. I’ll try not to overdo it. But I just got to eating the applesauce I packed in my lunch for today, and it was so good I had to share. I got this idea from Desree, so some of you may have seen this already, although I’m adding more specifics here for those like me who aren’t good with guessing at stuff. It’s easy, it’s relatively quick once you get the apples roasted, and it’s yummers. Much better than store bought, and probably better for you. (Des, if you’re reading, thanks again for the basics here!)

For the apples, I used Ginger Gold, I think; very likely any apple you like to eat would work. The spice mixture I used was 4 parts cinnamon, 2 parts nutmeg, 2 parts cardamom, 1 part cloves, all dried and ground. Unfortunately I’m not really certain how much I used of it, hence the generality below.

Ingredients:
1 medium-sized apple per serving
1.5 Tbsp turbinado/raw sugar per apple
a couple of generous pinches of spice mixture (see above)
cider, brandy, or other flavorful liquid (optional)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 F.

Peel, core and quarter apple(s). Place in a baking dish cut side up. Sprinkle with sugar and spices. Roast in oven for 30-40 minutes. When the apples are done, you should be able to squish them fairly easily with a fork.

Transfer apples to a bowl. Mash them up with a potato masher, fork, etc. (You could also use a ricer.) Be sure not to mash them too fine; small chunks are good. If you like your applesauce thinner, add some liquid such as brandy or cider here, but I found I didn’t need to add any liquid at all and came out with a nice thick applesauce.

You can serve this immediately, still somewhat warm, or stick it in the fridge to be served cold later; either way is good.

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Help! All my cousins are growing up on me!

It sounds like more congrats are in order–we’ve just gotten word that Kirstie and her guy Chuck have gotten engaged. Yay! Congratulations, guys! No word on when the wedding is yet. This is one that took the family by surprise on timing more than that it happened, I think. From what Mom told me at the last family reunion, it sounds like everyone was pretty clear that this would likely be happening (Chuck is/was/whatever bidding on a piece of farmland that’s been in the family for ages, which was a good indication), but we all thought the actual engagement would happen closer to Christmas. They just couldn’t wait!

There are roughly three groups of cousins in that family, I think, roughly divided by age. There’s the older girls (me, Megan, Kirstie), then “the boys” (my brother down through Jake), and then Bert and Diane’s kids, who sort of fit in with both other groups as necessary. This will mean that the first group is going to be all married off… I feel like it’s some kind of milestone or something.

Andrew, I just have to say–in all seriousness I’m not going to pressure you myself, but you know what this means for you. You’re the next oldest; now everyone’s going to be asking when it’s going to be your turn at the altar…

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Well, it’s done. I have my tattoo. We went to the same place Andrew went to. (Hey, Andrew–he remembered you and your friends and your geek tattoos!) I may post a photo when it’s fit to photograph; right now, of course, it’s got a bandage over it that I can’t take off until 1:15pm tomorrow. And then I’m assuming it’ll look kind of odd for a bit while it heals, so it might be a while. But, you know, basically this. It wound up being a little bigger than I’d intended, but that was because I’d misjudged how big I wanted it in the first place.

Andrew, either you have fewer nerve endings than I do, or you lie. I choose to assume the former. Cause… yeah, ouch, that hurt. I mean, it’s not so bad really, it’s just that little bit of pain continuing for the length of time the tatoo takes. But… Not so painful that I was like, “What the hell have I agreed to do????” Painful enough that I definitely wouldn’t be fond of the idea of getting one in one of the notoriously painful spots like lower back or ankle or shoulder blade, though.

So anyway. I got my ink, yay!

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I swiped this one from Slashdot:

Why I Switched to Firefox… by Scott Berkun, who worked on developing the user interface for Internet Explorer 1.0-5.0.

It’s a pretty neat blog entry all around. He’s got some good points–and he also examines five design flaws in Firefox’s interface, which is interesting. Mostly I can’t argue with him; he’s got some good points. He confuses me, though, in point #3 about tabs and new windows:

IE intentionally brings the browser history into the new window: the bet being that users who want to continue from where they left off can, and those that want to go their home page can do that with one click. … With multiple tabs (I find) the back/forward behavior becomes complex and hard to predict. Strict UI logic would put the tab UI above the toolbars, not below, but that creates other problems.

I’ve been using Firefox since version… 0.5? 0.4? Something like. For a while before it went all-out with the official 1.0 release, anyhow. I almost always have at the very least three tabs open–more often around five. Right now I’ve got seven. I think I’ve had as many as ten. I’ve never, never noticed a problem with the back and forward buttons the way he seems to be saying there’s a problem. It sounds like he’s saying that the histories of multiple tabs get mixed up within the program–I’ve never had that happen. As for the user confusing them, although that sort of doesn’t sound like what he means here, I’m not sure how it’s any more confusing than multiple windows; each tab has its own history, just as each window would once you started doing different things in them. It’s not complex or difficult to predict at all. If I hit “back” in this tab, I’ll get the Blogger dashboard; if I hit the “Back” button in the tab I’ve got a Tomato Nation column open in, I’ll get the index of the archives section I was in when I clicked to view the column.

I understand that I grok computer concepts, especially software, more easily than some people do, and that may be playing in here… But this isn’t some nursing student sitting through a CIS 101 class because it’s required even though she’s never touched a computer before in her entire life and isn’t really sure what any part of it is actually called, much less how to use a mouse. This is a guy that works on software design for a living. So I can’t imagine that I’m somehow just intuitively getting things that are really that difficult for him.

Maybe it’s just me being weird or something, I dunno…

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