Apparently we are completely out of the loop in our household these days, because if it hadn’t been for a stray reference in Stacy’s last journal entry, we would have not figured out that Sunday morning was Daylight Savings unless one of us was clued in enough to realize that the computers had magically updated themselves overnight. And what is worse, unlike earlier versions of Windows, Windows XP cannot even be bothered to give me that nice little message box telling me that my computer time was updated.

On the plus side, this meant we ended up getting up an hour earlier than planned, and thus had enough time to drive into Davis and have our weekend waffle breakfast Sunday morning before heading off to choir practice. On the down side, this whole Daylight Savings thing really screws up our internal clocks, because by 5pm we were both starving and by 8:30 I was ready to crawl into bed and call it a day. This was not helped by the fact that we went to dinner with my mom to a new restaurant in Davis and ended up eating far too much (especially of the desserts), and while we did try to walk it off afterwards by meandering around Borders (where my mom procured my older sister’s anniversary present and if she is reading this, may I just point out right now that mom has really outdone herself with this one. And I’m not laughing hysterically as I write this at all, nosirree), by the time we got home I was still too full from dinner and went and curled up on the bed waiting for the sheets to finish going through the dryer, too sleepy to care that the still-slightly-radioactive cat had settled on my head and was slowly cooking my brain.

It’s been a quiet weekend. Saturday we had a small donut binge while watching Bend it Like Beckham, and then we sorted through a few crates of things left over from our days in Benthic Creatures to finally get rid of it all, and dragged the recycling to the recycling center. We also made a trip to Costco, to wander the aisles eating samples for lunch and stock up on canned food. It was a worthwhile trip because we managed to score three Christmas presents, thereby dropping only minutely the number of items still remaining to be purchased before the holidays (and winter birthdays) are upon us.

We did not get around to hanging the curtains in the living room or the pictures in the dining room (sigh), but I am not too concerned, because there are still two more months before the end of the year when I promised myself that these things would be done. I did, however, sit down and crack a huge pile of walnuts – a task which resulted in my shredding my fingers on shell shards (And by the way, if there is some sort of technique to cracking walnuts so that the nut comes out in those perfect little halves that you can buy in the store, will someone please tell me? Please? Thank you).

I ended up with this huge pile of walnuts because my parents’ walnut tree is determined to provide enough walnuts each year to feed a small nation, and it is now the time of year when those with fruit or nut-bearing trees start foisting their extra produce on the rest of us (not, I should add, that I mind this one bit, because hey, free walnuts!). There are buckets of walnuts still at my parents’ house and this does not include the few tons of walnuts the gardeners scooped up and threw away the last time they mowed the backyard. I am eying the rather hefty bag of nut meats that is currently taking up a large portion of my freezer space and pondering how many loaves of nut bread I will need to bake in order to make any sort of sizeable dent in them. This is actually kind of nice, since autumn brings out my urge to bake. Even when the term ‘autumn’ has absolutely no relevance to the actual weather (in the 90’s today because, you know, it’s October and it’s not supposed to be *cooler* or anything. Sheesh).