Thanksgiving with the Greens was SO MUCH FUN. I'm glad I like my inlaws as much as I do. (I do!)
It's a lovely cold-and-rainy day here, and while driving wasn't much fun it sure was wonderful to come home from school and have some tea and honey in the drizzly quiet, with train sounds from the freightyard every so often. I don't know what it is about the train whistle+rain combination, but it is evocative of so many things I can't quite understand but can feel. It's gotten really truly cold here at last. We woke this morning to find that the row of crape myrtles in our front yard have turned the most breathtaking mustard-gold color, tinged with crimson. I keep staring at them.
Since I'm starting to run out of schoolwork, I'm getting back into couponing this week. I stopped doing it when we moved because I didn't have time, but the great thing is that since I couponed so much over the summer we had a lot of basic supplies stockpiled and we've bought basically no household items other than food all semester-- no shampoo, toothpaste, razors, or anything like that. Today I did my first CVS deal since August, and let me tell you it was a great'un, even though I didn't have any extrabucks to start with. Here's an outline for those of you who might be interested (I guess that means you, Rebekah. . .): my total was $37, then I got it down to $21 with coupons. I paid that with a gift card, and got back $18 in extrabucks! $18, all in one fell swoop! It was so much fun. I'm officially back in the game now.
Last night I had trouble sleeping, and when I have trouble sleeping my brain likes to amuse itself by pestering me with unpleasantness. The variety of unpleasantness it chose last night was to drag up memories of almost-regrets. You know what I mean? Those things you've done, or said, or didn't do, or didn't say, that you don't quite regret, but which make you feel just a bit squiffly around the edges. If you thought about them long and hard enough you might start regretting them, just a little, but you'd have to take them very seriously, more seriously than they seem to deserve. And that's the trouble. At that time of night actual regrets are much less troublesome, because you know exactly what you think about them: you've processed them, you've decided that the incident was worth regretting, and thus you've been able to package it up and store it away in a little cubbyhole where it can sit out of sight and not cause mischief. These squiffly thoughts, however, aren't so easy to process. So they poke around in odd places in your brain and start making faces at you when you least expect it. Some of the things I was thinking about last night I haven't thought about in ages and really had almost forgotten. But my brain's awfully good at making trouble so it's no wonder it was able to dig them all up and dust them off to show them to me.
(explanation of title: I'm listening to a recording of various poems in my car this week, and Jabberwocky is on it. I love it ever so dearly.)
(One-two, one-two, and through and through,/His vorpal sword went snicker-snack!)
