I’m between portable knitting projects again, which means I’ve picked up my Lightning Shawl again. But I’ve been eyeing hat patterns on Ravelry (Remember when I declared 2015 would be my year of hats? I haven’t knit one.), so maybe that will be cast on in the next few days.

On the reading front, in addition to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is my audiobook of the moment, I have the three blue books you see here in progress:

Hotel Bosphorus is a mystery set in contemporary Turkey and features the owner of a mystery-themed bookstore. The Thing about Jellyfish is a highly touted middle-grade read that had me tearing up on page 19 and full-out bawling by page 50, which led me to pick up Come Hell or Highball, about a 31-year old Long Island widow who takes up sleuthing after the death of her (it turns out) no-longer-so-rich husband. (I was hoping for Nora Charles or Phryne Fisher, but I don’t think she’ll be as charming or funny as either one, although, to be fair, Nora is both smarter and less interesting on the page than on the screen.)

Back at the beginning of the year, I decided to do Book Riot’s Read Harder challenge. Then I stopped reading much of anything, which makes completing any book-based challenge more difficult. I thought I’d take today to assess where I am in the challenge in order to see what I need to request from the library or pull from my TBR stacks.

No one will be surprised by some of the categories I’ve managed to leave until the end (foreign, non-fiction, sci-fi):

1. A book written by someone when they were under the age of 25: Nimona by Noelle Stevenson, age 23, was long-listed for the NBA in YA this year.
2. A book written by someone when they were over the age of 65: 68-year-old Dave Barry’s middle-grade book about an 8th-grade field trip gone awry: The Worst Class Trip Ever
3. A collection of short stories (either by one person or an anthology by many people): POSSIBILITY: In the Company of Sherlock Holmes (edited by Laurie King and Leslie Klinger)
4. A book published by an indie press: TO FINISH: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen was put out by Graywolf Press.
5. A book by a person whose gender is different from your own: Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
6. A book that takes place in Asia: POSSIBILITY: The God of Small Things
7. A book by an author from Africa: POSSIBILITY: Something by Veronique Tadjo, perhaps.
8. A book that is by or about someone from an indigenous culture (Native Americans, Aboriginals, etc.): TO FINISH: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
9. A microhistory: POSSIBILITY: I think I have one of Simon Winchester’s books in the other room… Or maybe Rebecca Skloot’s book’s book about Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells.
10. A YA novel: Ana of California by Andi Teran.
11. A sci-fi novel: POSSIBILITY: The Martian or Ready Player One (I’ve taken both books out several times this year; I’m starting to doubt my actual interest in reading either.)
12. A romance novel: Katie Fforde’s Practically Perfect was adorable and just what I wanted for a Valentine’s Day read.
13. A National Book Award, Man Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize winner from the last decade: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer earlier this year.
14. A book that is a retelling of a classic story (fairytale, Shakespearian play, classic novel, etc.): Breadcrumbs, by Anne Ursu, takes on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the Snow Queen.
15. An audiobook: I listened to Mr Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal on audio.
16. A collection of poetry: Jane Hirshfield’s The Beauty
17. A book that someone else has recommended to you: George by Alex Gino, was recommended to me by the children’s librarian at the Georgetown library.
18. A book that was originally published in another language: TO FINISH: Hotel Bosphorus by Esmahan Aykol (Translated by Ruth Whitehouse) was originally published in Turkish.
19. A graphic novel, a graphic memoir or a collection of comics of any kind: Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal, by G. Willow Wilson, is the collection of the first five comic books that tell how a nice Muslim girl in New Jersey becomes a superhero.
20. A book that you would consider a guilty pleasure (Read, and then realize that good entertainment is nothing to feel guilty over): I’m putting Jeff Goldberg’s Unrivaled: UConn, Tennessee, and the Twelve Years that Transcended Women’s Basketball here. I don’t feel guilty about the things I read, but this book fell so far of my hopes for it that I felt bad sticking with it when I had so many other books I wanted to read.
21. A book published before 1850: TO FINISH: Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, published in 1814, was the last of her completed novels I hadn’t read.
22. A book published this year: Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith
23. A self-improvement book (can be traditionally or non-traditionally considered “self-improvement”): Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-Town Obituary Writer by Heather Lende

So I still have nine categories to finish, but several books are in progress and/or in my possession at the moment, so here’s hoping. If anyone has alternative suggestions for those categories where I’ve put down possibilities (as opposed to ones where I have books to finish), I’m open to them.

This weekend was not especially full, but seemed exhausting. This may have been due to listening to three World Series games, only one of which we won. There’s always next year.

I finished my Halloween socks — on Halloween morning. (More on those later this week.)

I came up with a Halloween costume — on Halloween afternoon.

I may have chased down some trick-or-treaters who needed to take some of my candy. (Their parents were very excited by my 100 Grand bars.)

Rudi and I slept in on Saturday. I repeated this feat on Sunday.

We went out for tacos and hot drinks (two different restaurants).

We admired the trees or, rather, the leaves of a pocket park.

I went to the farmers market and bought lots of fall’ish foods: white turnips and dried beans and a pie pumpkin and sweet potatoes and broccoli, among other things.

I resumed, but didn’t finish my Robert Galbraith book, but did finish a collection of poetry.

I rode my bike to Georgetown to the library, to a cafe, and to the riverfront.

I dealt with late-inning baseball stress by poaching quince and cleaning the fridge.

I cuddled cats.

I missed the rain.

Weekending along with Karen at Pumpkin Sunrise.

This was my thought process for this year’s Halloween costume:

I’ve been a bit uninspired about Halloween this year, and since it was happening over the weekend, there was no real pressure to get dressed up for work. But that also meant that as of Friday night, I was still mulling over what I could be and coming up empty.

So when I got up yesterday, I thought, I’m not going to bother dressing up right now. Maybe I’ll figure out something in time for trick-or-treaters. But for now, I’ll just put on my Halloween socks and the one shirt I have that has someone in disguise:

[Camouflage, from Threadless.]

However, then I thought, wait, I could do that. I do not have a bee costume. But I could totally be someone pretending, badly, to be a bee! A surprisingly meta idea, for me!

So, to my shirt, I added dark leggings, my yellow petticoat, my yellow sneakers, and Rudi’s yellow & black armwarmers.

It was a good start, but insects have antennae and wings, neither of which I had a quick fix for.

You would think deely boppers would be the sort of thing I would own, but somehow I am lacking any. (In retrospect this may because they are often attached to plastic headbands made for people with normal-sized heads and my desire for one does not outweigh my desire not to have a headache.) I did have a headband, though, and figured I could probably fashion something out of straws or the like. But, then, when I was hunting for a black headband, I opened a box and discovered dowels that had come in a pair of shoes. So I tucked those into my hair and used the bottom of the headband to keep them in place.

What to do about the wings, though? I contemplated a quick cut-out of paper, but thought they’d be too floppy. Then I mulled cutting apart a padded mailer. That thought led me to the roll of air pillows that had come in a package a few weeks back. (It was a gift sent via Amazon, of course, who couldn’t fit something into an appropriately sized box if that was the only one available.) With some help from Rudi, a piece of Scotch tape, and an extra-large binder clip, I had some make-shift wings. (Yes, with a little more planning, I could totally have created a sleeve for the pillows to hide their ugly branding. But I wasn’t trying to be a bee, but just a “bee,” so it was okay for it not to be perfect!) As a bonus, they fluttered very nicely in the breeze!

So there you have it: A last-minute Halloween costume taken from my closet and random bits of stuff I hadn’t thrown away. And a lot of joy from seeing people’s reactions to my costume (and for not having bailed on coming up with something).

Do you have any honey?