Happy Halloween, everyone.

It must be because of the hot and long summer that the trees are still green going into November. There are two maples in my backyard that still have their leaves. I wonder - will I be raking leaves and shoveling snow on the same day? This day was glorious. I mowed and swept in the afternoon and it was wonderful to be outside.

In the morning, though, I noticed that it was getting chilly inside the house. At first I thought that it was because I was upstairs, then because I was downstairs, then finally I realized that it really was cold. The furnace wasn't working. The thermostat didn't have its usual display, so I figured that was the place to start looking. (Note to my Eco friends - I did install a programmable thermostat, even though it's set kind of high right now.)

Somehow, even though I've worked with apartments and have a good track record with isolating problems and making repairs, there's still something inside me that panics and thinks that I can't fix whatever it is, that only a MAN can make this right. Then I have to sit myself down and talk to myself. I realized that the thermostat had little indentations top and bottom, which must mean that the cover is made to come off. Inside were two AA batteries and once they were replaced, all was well. I would have been so embarrassed to have called a repair person or even Mike only to have them replace batteries.

I quilted a lot on Aaron's cuddle quilt today. I tried to tell myself that this is a quilt for a baby, that it will be chewed, stepped on, and peed on, that it's not going to the quilt show, and that it has cotton batting and doesn't need to be quilted every 1/4 inch. But, oh, it does, somehow, all those meandering stitches. Maybe I just need to do my best for that little guy, or maybe it's morphing from a cuddle quilt into a wall quilt. We'll see.