Time flies by so fast. Maybe it will slow down a little: yesterday i felt the depression break as i was deglazing the pan in which had fried up polenta, onions, radishes, and fennel. This was the second iteration of the lunch (second half of the fennel bulb), and i had been delighted -- maybe just pleased, or proud, really-- with the lunch before (despite the depression). But i felt it yesterday.

And despite the depression, i have acknowledged how lovely this fall has been. Very yellow and gold when i wish for more red and orange. The buckeye dropped its leaves before i could enjoy their orange during the drought, but a dogwood in the back is nice and red. I wish to grow sumac and enjoy their red. The persimmon and blueberries will be red sometime, but not yet. But! Really, quite a lovely yellow and gold. I'm not feeling the "ugh more yellow" feeling i have had previous years. The purple (bright pink?) chrysanthemums and the continuing lantana blooms have helped. (Slight shame at non-native landscaping, but the ironweed is over.)

The Fuyu-style persimmons have been wonderful this year. I suppose there's still a chance of persimmons on the native tree. I am admittedly not letting them get all the way ripe, so they aren't honeyed sweet. Still learning  how to pick them.

We gave Bruno a long break from Marlowe and he was coming out of his retreat. Saturday we took him to our bedroom and closed him in there, allowing me to do a deep vacuum of the front room. We rearranged the furniture, moved in the glorious cat litter cabinet (a cabinet enclosing a custom made insert that creates a easy to clean, very large litter space), and hung one of my grandmother's paintings behind where i sit at work. We rotated the bed and it feels more roomy - -and also many of the boxes are now stacked where the cabinet was. (Lots of self criticism about all the Stuff stashed, and the fact that this is really the first art i've hung since we moved in -- at least now all the art stashed in the closet might be more easily accessed.)

Sunday Marlowe slipped by me to instigate a screaming match with Bruno under the bed. Bruno seems less traumatized than before, but i do think he's holding to safe spaces more than he was.

Hints at other things from the weekend and yesterday: Rising moon -- Death faire -- Wisdom circle ponderings power vs strength -- grief about ITP and fatigue & "you don't have reason to indulge in feelings" inner response & interrogation revealing a particular point in the landscape from my middle school-first years of high school home -- green wall coming down -- spicebush yellow under the invasive blue green silverberry -- investing in plant stands for summer hanging planters -- disgust at the cruelty of US administration.

Well, that was a thing. I took a long weekend, and there were ups and downs.

Thursday and Saturday night took nice long dog walks  at dusk in the nearby mega-development along trails and lamp-lit streets. Carrie and i went with my sister and her dog on Thursday, returned with Christine on Saturday.

Friday night i saw my niece in as the lead in "She Kills Monsters," which is about the relationship between an older sister and her younger deceased sister, in which the elder realizes that assumptions that her younger sister was cisgender or heterosexual were not necessarily correct. It was a little surreal to watch sitting next to my younger sister, while watching my niece play opposite her girlfriend.

Sunday i met up with my sister and dad at a house he's looking at in between the two of us. I hope he jumps on buying it. [News: he's decided not to move again. Oh well.]

I spent lots of time resurrecting coding environment in my laptop, using mise to handle dependencies and environment along with poetry for python. Had a headache getting my diagramming tool container running. I think i was just (1) trying to run on a port with something else on it and then (2) had conflicts with the development environment user/workspace/folder configurations. Instead i chased the container management system, switching to a new system, and fiddled forever with ai assisted node scripts (i don't know javascript really) to see if there were firewalls etc etc oh good grief. Very cranky making.

And my project was aligning my records of absences with work's. By definition, work is correct for previous years, and it seems the offset errors are in previous years. So i put in offset corrections. But that was fussy and annoying. However, i learned about "frictionless" data manifests. That delights me no end.  In general i am trying to learn to manage things "right" in semi-standard idiom and patterns. Over the past few months i've developed a personal style guide (leaning heavily on work's) and a workspace template. This was the first time trying to get the template running at home, so, yes, some bumps.

CPAP has been stopping in the middle of the night and my ("smart") watch started dying within hours of a full charge. Sunday morning i woke in a terrible mood because i had awakened 03:30ish to a watch with just 3% battery after going to bed with a day and 21 hours of charge. I also woke to no air. I couldn't fall back asleep, so i ended up spending hours trying to factory reset and reconnect to my phone with no luck. I think i found some setting that will fix the CPAP behavior: i didn't know if i was turning it off in the middle of the night myself, but last night i slept well.

This morning i had to fast -- including NO TEA!! -- for a "wellness" blood draw to get a $500 reduction on my health insurance premium. I think it will be worth it. I stopped in the past because it was all very intrusive with lots of participation in online portals that seemed pretty annoying. This year it simply (it seems?) requires a bio-metric screening. What i don't know is if the coaching is triggered by being pre-diabetic or simply a BMI trigger. It doesn't seem that one has to engage with the coaching to get the reduction in the premium. I trust my doctor, i don't need an algorithm. Anyhow, i survived the fasting by not taking my vitamin B in the morning, and beat back the caffeine withdrawal with coffee.

I did get blue and have had lots of self recrimination about not being outside this vacation. But trying to accept my focus. We did have a lovely Sunday dinner with a Quorn roast (mushroom based protein loaf) with home-grown chestnuts among the carrots, onions, and potatoes, and a cranberry relish with  home-grown persimmons and spice bush spices.  I thought i might have overdone it with the spice bush, using all of last year's frozen pulps+sugar. Fortunately Christine still loved the relish, and i was motivated while it was cooking to get this year's second harvest of pulps separated from seeds. (The first harvest went bad in the fridge as i neglected it.) By the time of the second harvest some of the spice bush berries had dried out on the shrub. People often dry them whole, so i had some of those ground over slices of persimmon for breakfast for several days: also yummy.