For the love of the game...

Dear Neighbours (and everyone else honking a car horn or setting of fireworks);

I understand that you're enthused and generally overflowing with joviality and good feeling thanks to what, apparently, was a stupendous win for your home country's sports team today. Really, I'm glad you all seem to have found such a sense of community because of the outcome of this particular form of entertainment - the chanting and the dancing in the streets were, I'm sure, quite the good time; unparalleled in your everyday lives.

However; some of us are trying to watch tv, or spend a quiet evening in together, or - Heaven forfend - study. This time of night usually affords a phenomenon that seems quite alien to you at this point in time: it's called peace and quiet. Now, far be it for me to be the Scrooge-like voice of reason that vehemently urges you all back into your automobiles so that traffic for the rest of the city may continue in its usual fashion. It's the last thing from my mind to suggest waspishly that this is, in fact, a main thoroughfare for cars and bikes and buses, not a car park. I wouldn't even dream of scowling in frustration and annoyance to tell you that putting all your weight into the car horn for 35 seconds at a time really isn't the best method to show support and exuberance at your team's victory.

All of that said, I do have to say that nothing could please me more than if you would kindly, get in your cars, shut up, and go home. I feel obliged to let you all know that it's incredibly difficult to think - and I'm sure to sleep or carry on a normal conversation - when one is deafened by the cacophony of dozens of car horns in concert with the machine-gun-like sounds of multiple fireworks being let off in rapid succession. If the finale to the 1812 overture was meant to be played on Citroens and Fiats rather than trumpets and violins, I'd be chuffed to bits at your unholy racket just outside my window. As this is not the case, I would appreciate your immediate removal.

Sincerely, and with fondest wishes,

your friendly neighbour

Routine

There's something nice about settling into a routine...even when that routine consists of spending full days online reading scholarly articles and browsing through the catalogues of various museums and galleries. Of course, sometimes I break up that routine by actually *going* to the museums and galleries. I can walk to most of them, so I ought to go more often. What stops me? The need to make trips to various libraries and do other research tied to my computer.

Other breaks in routine are more interesting. Like a couple of weeks ago: Sebastian and I went pumpkin picking. Figures that it would take me this long to actually go pick pumpkins in a field, and when I do it's a sad picked over little field the weekend before Halloween. Still, it was fun.

We picked out two pumpkins in the end that looked suitable for carving. Of course, by the time our respective routines of work and school gave us the time to carve pumpkins, the larger of the two had gone scary and mouldy and gross. (Sad face) So the Friday night before Halloween, we resolved to carve our remaining pumpkin. After making dinner, eating dinner, doing the washing up, and some lengthy debate we decided that it was entirely too late to spend the hour or so it would take to nicely carve our pumpkin. We would do it the following morning.

Saturday morning came and found us both lounging around without the decent motivation to do much of anything. Not to mention the question had come up again about whether to do a traditional carved-all-the-way-through pumpkin with its stereotypical triangle eyes and a jagged mouth any dentist or oral surgeon would shudder to consider. The other two options were to find an appropriately interesting stencil online (easier said than done since we weren't about to have a Twilight-themed pumpkin, and Lord Voldemort just wasn't inspiring) or to go for the gold and have a 3-D sculpted pumpkin. The latter was out since we decided that we had neither the tools nor the skills nor the patience to create such a horrifyingly good work of art. Where did this leave us? With two uncarved pumpkins. If the second one hasn't yet succumbed to rot, I think I want to carve it this weekend just to be able to say that we did.

Of course, the pumpkin picking itself was lovely, and afterwards, there was a store attached to the complex that made me very happy indeed. Not only was there a farmers' market/grocery store that had a tiny niche of American foods (including my beloved Libby's brand pumpkin!), but there was a larger store full of Christmas ornaments.

I confess here to being a hopeless case when it comes to Christmas. I love Thanksgiving and all the cooking that accompanies it - I intend to go the whole nine yards this year and put Martha Stewart to shame - but nothing can compare with the joy of decorating for Christmas. I have a bug full of Christmas ornaments current sitting patiently on my bookshelf. The minute the calendar says "December" (once I get a psychiatric evaluation for hearing little voices) those ornaments are coming out of the bag and I'll be determined to find an excuse to hang them somewhere. In fact, in the midst of my excitement at finding hundreds of yards of shelf space dedicated to cute Christmas ornaments, I was able to extract from Sebastian the vague promise to come back and snatch up some more in the flurry of post-season sales.

The only thing that lowered the tone of my excitement after that? :-) Discovering that the inching caterpillar toys had been wound up and then placed into compromising positions in their display jar. Lovely handiwork, Babe.