Did you have a nice holiday?

We did.

We carved jack o’lanterns. Mine’s on the left:

I decorated my office:

I got dressed up (and, no, you’re right; I’ve used this idea before):

It requires a coat hanger and an entire can of orange hair spray (and the ability to remain calm when half-asleep and unable to remember how to braid after doing it regularly for 33 years):

But it all adds up to a lot of fun!

Did you do anything for Halloween?

I had a pleasant weekend that began with an outdoor film in the park at Dupont Circle.

As is proper, they began with Loony Toon cartoons and then moved on to The Maltese Falcon. I’ve seen the end several times, but had always missed the set-up, so it was nice to see that part this time. The weather was a little cool and I hadn’t brought a warm enough layer, so I dozed a bit in the later sections. We followed that by coming home to our cozy apartment and pulling up a French animated film on NetFlicks: The Painting.

On Saturday, we biked down to the Yards to meet John and Nicole for VegFest. We had some tasty vegan doughnuts and some dairy-free ice cream, and I followed it up with a veggie slider a local restaurant was debuting. The festival was enjoyable, but the sun was beating down on the parking lot the event was being held in and after a couple hours, we were all glad to grab a cool, shadowy Metro. John and Nicole headed home, but Rudi and I stopped in Shaw to hit the D.C. State Fair. (No, D.C. is not a state, but we have aspirations and crafty, farmy folks.)

Here you can see the entries into the crochet and knitting categories (there was the D.C. flag category and the baby hat category). Aren’t the first-place mittens lovely?

The Coffee Bar was only a few blocks away and I cajoled Rudi into going there instead of home. He was glad once we had drinks and chairs, and we ended up staying until they closed.

On Sunday, while Rudi was riding his first 100-mile bike ride of the year, I slept in, hit the farmers market, came home to veg for a while, and then remembered the Corcoran Gallery is closing for an indeterminate amount of time beginning next week. I biked down there and spent a couple hours looking at art. I took a bunch of photos, so maybe I’ll post about that in more depth later. In the meantime, this is Giuseppe Croff’s The Veiled Nun, and that veil and her face under it is a solid piece of marble. Impressive, right?

I finished off the weekend with an ice cream cone; a trip to the garden to water, harvest, and plant lettuce; and the premiere episode of Madame Secretary, which we both liked quite a bit.

It was a full weekend!

This weekend was filled with:

• The final Friday night concert at The Yards for the summer
• Turning up for an early work shift at the garden to discover one of our fellow gardeners had gotten a jump start on filling the water barrels.
• The latest Harry Potter re-listen coming available from the library.
• An afternoon nap.
• The members sale at my local bookshop.
• Dinner at our favorite local pizzeria.
• Out of bed and biking off to the playground to meet some friends to start the day.
• A trip to the farmers market for a bunch of things including garden huckleberries, sorrel, and a foot-long Italian squash.
• An almond croissant and a cuppa for brunch.
• A s’more (made with a homemade marshmallow) and a cup of coconut juice (with coconut meat for later snacking) at a local street festival and meeting up with friends there.
• Talking to my folks and knitting in the park.
• Stopping for a cup of tea at a local bakery before biking home.
• A few new-to-me episodes of a favorite tv show.
• Chatting with Rudi as I ate my typical Sunday dinner of homegrown tomatoes and basil, mozzarella, olive oil, and baguette.

Oh, August… I had such grand plans for you, but the results were underwhelming:

• We did see a show. Two, in fact, while we were on our fantastic New York trip. Bullets over Broadway was well paced and tightly acted, while Rock of Ages was charming, if sexist. We agreed that we missed doing this, so will make an effort to see more traveling shows in D.C. and to regularly catch the bus north to see more things in their original runs on Broadway.
• I barely eked out a single pair of socks, although I did touch two others. On one, I started the second sock before remembering that the yarn had been a poor choice for the design and rapid progress was hindered by that and my inability to actually read a pattern. On the other, I’ve found contrasting yarn for the toe and am ready to bind off the first sock. (This would be more impressive if I hadn’t picked it up with only the toe left to knit.)
• I left my bike ride too late in the month, although in part that was due to being out of town most weekends. So when the final day of August was hot and hazy and humid with thunderstorms predicted for the afternoon, I’d run out of deferment time. I did go out. I should have eaten better beforehand. And I should have left earlier in the day. I made it to Old Town, but it took me nearly two hours to complete the 10 miles. I was so slow, molasses sped past me. There was a headwind, but that can’t have been all of it. I was just sluggish. And then because getting out there had been such an ordeal (and because I wasn’t looking in the right direction), I spent more time there than I should have and only made it a quarter of the way back before detecting lightning in front of me. (I am stupid about many things, but riding a metal vehicle through trees and along and over water during an electrical storm is not my brand of it.) Ultimately, I turned back to Braddock Road metro and took the train back to D.C., ending the day sopping wet and still about 3.5 miles short of my goal.

But the point of this goal-setting exercise is to not be bogged down by failure and ineptitude and weather and slow fingers, but instead to come up with new things each month to attempt. Here are my three goals for September:

1. Exercise twice a week. Last year at this time I was doing something active four times a week (admittedly as the final step in a three-month challenge, but still…); now I just feel sluggish and slow. I’d thought the pool being open during the summer would help, but I just didn’t make it over there during the week, although I was there nearly every weekend of the season. Volleyball starts back up again soon, so that’s once a week. Now I just need something else: at least 30 consecutive minutes of something else.
2. Update my resume. The grant that funds my job is coming to an end, and, while my boss continues to attempt to secure funding to keep us all employed, there are no promises past the end of the year. To keep as many options open as possible, it’s time to start looking at what else is out there.
3. Talk to a far-off friend once a week. It’s been ages since I’ve spoken with a couple of my friends and it’s time to get back in touch. Even if the conversations are short, at least the connections will be re-established.

What are you hoping to do this month?

I’m messy. This comes as a surprise to no one who knows me. A friend’s tween once described our apartment in Middletown as “touching heaven,” filled with a broad array of stuff. Periodically I get fed up with the clutter and the swath of paper threatening to take me down and I go on a recycling/tidying binge, but mostly I’m okay with piles and have a good idea of where in the morass things are.

Except I sometimes like to pretend that I’m not messy. I admit that usually when company comes, large piles of stuff end up in our bedroom, and not just the things like the bathroom towel rack that needs to come off the door if you want it to close properly, which some people want it to do. I spend hours frantically cleaning and throwing things away and running around frazzled before company comes, trying to get a handle on the mess.

It’s never totally successful, but I’ve always assumed it mattered to my guests.

But I’ve realized, now that friends are busy with their lives and spread across the country, that I care way less about what my home looks like and how and with whom time in it is spent. My mother-in-law stopped letting people into her home 20 years ago because she was ashamed of how its cleanliness had gotten away from her as she’d aged. And I just think how sad that must be to want to see friends and to fear that they’d think less of you because of your stuff.

I deliberately asked an old friend and his family back to the Burrow this evening, even though it wasn’t clean for company and even though I knew I hadn’t emptied the cat boxes before leaving for work, but that I had folded our laundry, leaving piles of underwear in the living room to await our return. We’d been having a good time and I’d made excuses on his previous visits and we’ve known each other more than two decades now and he’s seen my college dorm rooms, for god’s sake, even if his family hadn’t.

So they came back and the world didn’t explode and we just moved the piles of laundry and cleared off chairs and entertained them with our cats. Maybe they cared about the mess. Maybe they didn’t. I refuse to consider the matter further. I’m just so glad to have spent time with them at home.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still going to clean the toilet and the bathroom sink and empty the cat boxes before you come over (as long as I know you’re coming ahead of time, anyway). And I expect parties will still send me into a tizzy for days before. But maybe I’ll just say, “The house is a mess, but I don’t care if you don’t. Come anyway if you like,” and mean it. Because I have faith that we are friends and that you also believe a home is made by the people in it.

Sharing with Amanda’s August prompts.

This weekend there was:

• Blocking the latest knitting project on the office floor over the weekend. (No doors to keep out cats means all blocking over a certain size gets done at work.)
• Friday evening at The Yards with friends means eating a salad while lying on the ground listening to covers of pop music (from the last 30 years) and watching pink clouds.
• Making it back across town in time for cocoa outside at a coffeehouse.
• Rising early (for me) for a garden work day. We filled water barrels and weeded the pathways and then I harvested a few things.
• Stopping at the store and finding nearly no line.
• A yogurt parfait with lots of berries from my fridge.
• A surprise text from an old friend saying he and his family were on their way to town and was I free to meet up with them in an hour?
• Seeing Jason, his wife, Essia, and their daughters, who are going into 6th and 8th grade (I remember when they were babies!!) in the fall. Catching up on their lives for a few hours. Parting with the hopes of a follow-up visit later in the week.
• Discovering a comic book store had moved into the neighborhood and making a few purchases.
• Chatting with my family.
• Going to a midnight showing of the ’80s classic, Labyrinth.
• Sleeping in the middle of the bed, surrounded by cats, while Rudi was out of town.
• A farmers market stroll.
• A swim with Rudi after he returned home.
• Laundry. Clean socks and underwear!
• Sitting out at the local coffeeshop as the sun broke through the clouds.
• Pulling up the episode of Endeavour we missed the day before it disappeared from PBS’ website.
• A thunderstorm.
• Finishing a book.

How about you? How was your weekend?