Three beautiful things from my past week:

1. More people voted in this election than ever before. And even though it was not a clear repudiation of the appalling lack of leadership and compassion at the national level the way I’d hoped there’d be, there were bright, bright spots, with the possibility (::fingers crossed!::) of at least one more to come.

2. I’ve gotten outside for a short walk two sunny mornings this week.

3. Thai food takeout (panang curry and veggie spring rolls) for Election Night supper.

How about you? What’s been beautiful in your world lately?

By this point in the week, I’d expected to be done with Brandy Colbert’s The Voting Booth, a book about two Black teens on Election Day. But I hadn’t counted on being swallowed alive by work or fighting off the anxiety of the election with evening naps. Silly me! I should have expected that!

I’m also surprised to still find myself (just) on this side of the heel of my sock. I’d planned on turning the heel last night (instead of working) and then working on the foot during the four-hour phone call I was doing that presentation for. The one that got canceled this morning. Good for the work I needed to do, but not good for my knitting.

Hopefully by this weekend I’ll be done with both. I’ve got other things waiting impatiently on the sideline.

Head over to As Kat Knits to see how others are spending their knitting and reading time.

I spent last night on a Zoom call with Rudi and a couple friends from shortly before midnight (they’re all out West, and I’m a night owl) until nearly 2:30. I was also working on a presentation for this afternoon at the same time.

When I got off with them, I emailed the Powerpoint to my boss, ate an ice cream sundae, put on the tv, and pulled out the laptop to write this blog post. And then promptly fell asleep on the couch, exhausted by the day’s activities and the crushing disappointment that we don’t know much, except that way more people in our country suck than I’d hoped. (I know, I know. They don’t suck. They just … live in a world where it makes sense to hand your car keys to someone who, in the past has driven your car full speed into a brick wall, and now wants to take take your little kid for a spin on a mountain pass at midnight in a huge storm without a seat belt on. While drunk. And high. And a jerk.

Okay, well, I guess I have to go get ready for a work day that includes a four-hour strategic planning meeting. I’d tell you to think good thoughts for me, but keep them with the fate of the country. My meeting will wrap up by day’s end; I can’t say the same for this nightmare.

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl pulls us kicking and screaming away from our books to inquire about what hobbies we have besides reading

Mine include:

1. Knitting, mostly socks and shawls. Relatedly, collecting yarn.
2. Playing volleyball, although not in the past eight months.
3. Gardening. I just picked 20 pounds of green tomatoes in advance of a cold night. Anyone have any favorite recipes?
4. Celebrating Christmas. (My family is inching up into the three-month-long celebration range. On another related note, I run a Virtual Advent Blog Tour, and I invite you to learn more about it on the 15th of this month.)
5. Baking. I anticipate stress baking a lot over the next week.
6. Checking out dessert vendors, like ice cream parlors and bakeries and chocolate shops. I’ve decided this is a hobby and that I am very good at it. I may be a little behind my local sampling because of COVID, but probably not as much as one might expect.
7. Travel. I’ve been to 39 states (okay it may be a couple more, but you can’t count states from when you were an infant, can you?) and a handful of foreign countries, and I would really like to visit more once going places further than the other side of town is deemed acceptable again.
8. Painting my nails. They’re currently orange and black with sparkles, but I’ll need to consider what’s next sometime soon.
9. Going to the beach. The pool is also very nice.
10. Watching movies. We used to go to the cinema once a week, and in fact, we hit the movie theater twice the week before everything shut down back in March.

Don’t forget to vote today, Americans, if you haven’t already! If you’re at a poll when they close, stay in line. They will let you vote! And if you experience or witness voter intimidation or irregularities, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

We are now months and months into pandemic shutdowns, travel restrictions, and general malaise. In an effort to keep these last months of the year from spiraling into a hot mess, I thought I’d come up with a list, similar to the ones I often make for weekends, of things I’d like to accomplish each month. I will not get mad at myself if I don’t cross items off, but if I get stuck this gives me a physical place to turn to to see what I could work on.

This month is … fraught. This weekend marked week three Rudi was out in Salt Lake. We know he’ll be out there at least another week, but it has the potential to stretch on for a while past then. And the sun has hit the road south to go shine on other people for the next three-plus months. And the fate of democracy … there is reason to be hopeful. Maybe not optimistic, but hopeful.

But either way, I need to do a better job of taking care of myself in November than I did in October.

Here’s how I think I can do that:

• Eat supper by ten each night. (I know. Some of you are in bed at that hour. I’m not. And ten would be a huge improvement over midnight, which is when I’ve been eating about half the time.)
• Get out once a week first thing in the morning before my first work call. This will be painful, but it’s probably my best shot at getting some sun during the week. Also try to take at least one midday workweek walk around the block.
• Eat more veggies. I keep buying them as if someone is going to cook them for me. Related: Look through the cookbooks I love to buy and then hand off to Rudi.
• Start working on Christmas stuff. I cannot make mixes, write cards, and craft all at the same time. So I need to start earlier. Maybe if I write out the envelopes in early November at least I’ll actually get my cards out this year. I have already started sampling new Christmas tunes. And I’ve done a little shopping and started looking for other gifts. (Yes, to Bridget and others wondering, we are doing the Virtual Advent Tour again this year. I’ll have a formal announcement a little later in the month.)
• Put out more fairy lights.
• Plan a virtual tree-trimming party. (The tree will still be IRL.) Or maybe several? Those mass Zoom calls don’t seem so fun to me.
• Bake something. Anything at this rate. Or make bread. Also, see if the sourdough starter in the fridge is still any good.
• Spend more time reading and less time on my phone.
• Get through all my recycling and paper shredding. (I hate my shredder, so I just stopped using it.)
• Call my friends.

How about you? What will help you get through November?

I may have mentioned before that I tend not to give a lot of thought to Halloween costumes until the day of (or, maybe the night before). I have an interesting closet of “normal” clothes that lends itself well to a set of concepts, and I find that procrastinating encourages my brain toward creative combinations.

It does mean that some aspects of costumes get inadequate attention, but I learned years ago that as long as you give people the suggestion, they’ll usually get there in the end. (The exception to this was Raggedy Ann, which pretty much no one got, in part because I resorted to red hair spray, rather than yarn.)

This year, my wings came up a little short. If I’d thought about this last weekend, I could have knit wings, but I didn’t. So I made do with tissue paper around jewelry wire and fastened to my cycling visibility “vest” contraption beneath my jacket. Sometimes they looked like wings and other times leafy epaulets.

On a warmer Halloween, I might have opted for a different top. But since the high today was in the low 50s and I was spending the evening at a concert in the park, I wanted warmth. I did trade out my wreath for a hat (but with the tiara on top of it) and added long mitts.

I should also add that it’s particularly challenging to get a full-length shot by yourself, so apologies for it not being the best exposure/angle. I had to use the selfie timer and prop it up against my bag of tomatoes and herbs on an upside-down water barrel.

And I will add a thank you to my parents, who feed my quirky tastes. My mom made the tulle skirt for me a few years back. The velvet jacket is also from them, as are the sparkly Chucks, the bag (for storing fairy dust, hand sanitizer, knitting, and candy corn), and the bubble wand. The fake fur muff was a gift from my brother decades ago.

What fun combinations did your closets offer up this Halloween?