I'm in a holiday mood!

I took an orange artificial pumpkin to work today, along with my shoebox of Halloween things, and I put them up on top of the cabinets in my cubicle. (I used to have a lot more Halloween stuff, but I gave it away when I was living in Fort Worth, because the duplex was so small.)

Had a calm, productive day at work and came home by way of Trader Joe's and Braum's. Ginger cookies, chocolate covered ginger, pumpkin bread mix, those tiny pumpkin cookies I brought home a couple of weeks ago, and some pumpkin spice salted caramels (!). The pumpkin bread is almost ready to come out of the oven. Breakfast tomorrow will be pumpkin bread with cream cheese. I threw in half a cup each of craisins and freshly chopped pecans, as the box suggested, but am passing on the powdered sugar glaze. (As a celebrity who is famous mostly for being famous once said, you don't slap a bumper sticker on a Bentley.)

We are also stocked up on milk, buttermilk, and orange juice for the weekend. My goal is to stay in the house (preferably in my pajamas) until it's time to get ready for church on Sunday morning.

I've worked about half of the second pattern section on the Geology Shawl. As soon as the pumpkin bread is out of the oven and I've washed my hands, I'm going to curl up either in my wing chair or on my bed and knit until I can't keep my eyes open any longer.

For dinner we had the tiny ravioli from Trader Joe's, simmered in chicken stock, with half of the chopped onion I'd been sweating added to the cooked pasta (the other half is helping to wilt a batch of spinach) and a little over half a jar of very simple tomato sauce heated and stirred in. I portioned out one day's lunch, and we inhaled the rest of it.

The pumpkin bread is cooling on top of the stove. A ridiculous amount of objects are soaking in the sink, because the dishwasher is running. The spinach is more or less refusing to wilt, so I think I will pop it into a large glass bowl and into the cooling oven and leave it there awhile.