I am here and am hoping that regular blogging will return sometime this week. The trip to Salt Lake just took a lot out of me and I’ve been in a funk since our return.

It even got so bad last week that I took my brother’s advice and went out for drinks with friends. I ordered an alcoholic beverage — my first ever. But it was nasty, so my consumption was limited to three sips. (In defense of the drink, no one else seemed to be under the impression that it reeked of liquor. In fact, they kept telling me how sweet it was!)

But I’ve been occupying my time productively when not trying to acquire a new bad habit. I’ve done a bit of housecleaning and some laundry. I am running low on handknit socks, though, so a load of sink washing must move up on my priority list…

I’ve done a bit of cooking recently. We made a batch of Jenn’s tomato sauce last month and I followed it up with Mum’s recipe for baking tomatoes. Well, not so much baking, as preserving. Sort of… Tonight I baked an apple crisp as a follow-up to the delicious turnip soup Rudi made for supper. (Of course, I started it too late for it to be done before Rudi toddled off to bed, but I promised him he could eat it for breakfast if he wanted…) While in Salt Lake, we had a delicious pear coffee cake one morning at a cafe, and Rudi’s mom sent us home with a handful of pears (and plums and quinces and apples and herbs), so I may give that a shot sometime soon unless Rudi decides he’s going to start eating them.

The garden continues to give us petite tomatoes and the pepper plants all have flowers covering them. I planted a rather late crop of squash, so although the plants have come up, I’m not convinced they’ll make it to vegetable stage. Although our frosts come pretty late in the year, so who knows. A volunteer lettuce popped up from the spring’s harvest going to seed, and our chard remains ever faithful.

I’ve been knitting quite a bit, but not finishing an awful lot. I have one mitt and one sock done, so either half of me will be nice and toasty or I’ll have to switch it up and go the right sock/left mitt route and hope that keeps either side from too much shivering.

Reading has been more successful, although I think I failed to finish any of the three challenges I took on over the summer. Plus, I have gotten so behind on book reviews that I need to figure out a new way to handle them. Or just suck it up and crank them out and inundate you with reviews. Any thoughts on that? And I missed the National Book Festival while I was in Salt Lake, which just makes me crabby to think about…

I try to get out on the bike each weekend, but my progress is slow when I go on my own (and Julia and I have not been coordinating our schedules well lately…) Bike D.C. is coming up in two weeks, so maybe I’ll see if any of our friends are interested in signing up with me. I also should sign up for that yoga class I keep telling Elspeth and Julia I’m going to take. Maybe when I get back from our long Connecticut weekend. I have done more commuting on the bike this year than ever before, helped by the delays caused by the Red Line crash earlier this year. (They were completely necessary and understandable, but I had a way around them, so why not take advantage of my two wheels?)

Anyway, that’s my version of a catch-all catch-up. Maybe tomorrow I’ll offer you my reflections on the baseball season…