kdiddy.org

We were standing at the bus stop yesterday morning, staring at the shattered glass in the street that must have been from an earlier traffic accident, and cringing every time a car drove over it.

Daylight Savings had made the morning just a bit more bearable, gifting us with light and an extra hour the day before.

At our house a block away, an obscenely large pile of Halloween candy sat, waiting to be slowly devoured.

“Can I tell you a secret?” I said.

“Yeah,” replied the baby.

“I’m kind of excited for Christmas already.”

“Is that really a secret?”

“Well, kinda. When you’re a grown-up you’re not really supposed to get that excited for Christmas, and you’re definitely not supposed to get excited for it at the very beginning of November.”

“Oh. Well, I’m excited, too.”

I feel kind of weird not joining in with the groaning about the holiday season and the shamelessly early marketing. But that stuff’s not even really on my mind. Since money will most likely be extraordinarily tight this year, the stress of shopping isn’t even an issue.

I’m just so looking forward to having some time off and being with my guys. I hope it snows and is so cold that hot chocolate becomes an hourly necessity.

I can’t wait to bake a ton of cookies. I’ve been somewhat accidentally stockpiling flour, buying a few sacks at a time whenever I spot a sale, and have signed up to receive the Cookie Countdown emails from MyRecipes. Seriously, starting around mid-December, if you’re anywhere near my house, stop in and grab a dozen or two. It’ll be silly.

I think it’s notable that before I even turned 30, I already owned two pairs of Easy Spirits and one pair of Aerosoles. (They’re cute, though. Honest. Not so orthopedic-looking.)

On Saturday, I turned 31, and I think my footwear is now totally age-appropriate, especially since I was ready to take to my bed after trick-or-treating with the baby.

I normally announce my birthday and this year I didn’t because I was too mopey. It wasn’t my age getting me down, but that lingering sadness from things not totally going our way. If you know me, you know that when I get sad, I get REALLY sad, and as my birthday approached, I panicked at the thought of random outbursts of tears whenever someone asked me how we were doing.

Early last week, I called my mom and told her that I just didn’t feel like celebrating my birthday and that I really wasn’t trying to be dramatic. And while my family wouldn’t let me get away with completely ignoring my birthday, things were very low-key this year, and I was so glad to put all of my energy into helping my kid celebrate Halloween.

The baby went as Zombie Troy Polamalu and his costume turned out pretty fantastic.

The only stuff that we had to buy were the wig (Troy’s luscious locks are almost more famous than he is, so there was no getting around it) and the makeup. The wig was actually one of those ridiculous dreadlock wigs from the costume store that we just combed out, trimmed, and tied in a ponytail. I was wildly insecure about this because I had read at least a dozen posts leading up to Halloween about racist costumes. Then when nobody noticed the zombie part of his costume until after we pointed it out, I became even more worried that people were glancing at his painted face and assuming it was blackface. My white guilt. Let me show you it.

Anyway, we went to our neighborhood’s annual Halloween parade and the baby took home the prize for scariest costume. The parade was thankfully very brief this year, but I managed to snap a picture of zombie Troy with the baby mayor.

My mom came over to dole out candy while the husband and I went trick-or-treating with the baby. This was the first year that the baby really got into it and we managed to cover quite a few blocks. His haul weighed in at 14.5 pounds. And we had a ton of candy left over because our side of the boulevard is apparently not where it’s at when it comes to trick-or-treating. (One block was so anemic that I proposed an outreach program where people from other candy-deprived neighborhoods come in and hand out their goodies.)

On Sunday we had to be at the soccer field at 7:45 a.m. for a playoff game. The baby’s team won but he got an earful from us for goofing off the whole time and not trying whatsoever and then getting pissed when he screwed up. For the second playoff game at 12, he was fired up and played wonderfully, scoring his first-ever goal. So they get to play for the championship on Saturday. At 8 a.m. (*quiet weeping*)

You are still a little boy and we’ve only begun to really talk about all of the weird and wonderful things that there are to know in life. I think you’re doing an excellent job of understanding as best you can, though, and I think you realize that I only understand things a little bit better than you do.

We’ve also been talking a little bit about the bad things in life, about violence and poverty and things like that. These are even harder to understand and you can’t begin to imagine how nervous I am about being the person to explain them to you.

But it is my job, my duty, to do my best, to open the channels of dialog with you, to allow you to ask questions, to be honest about not having all of the answers, and to ask you questions to better understand your perspective on things.

One of the most puzzling aspects of humanity is gender and power and how people of different genders interact with each other. There are boys and there are girls and there are lots of people who are in between. Do you remember when we were talking about time and how I told you that it was something that humans created to help them make sense of the world? Gender is another one of those things. Boys and girls, at their core, are not fundamentally different creatures. But over many, many years, people sort of assigned roles and behaviors to both sexes. For better or worse, this also helped people to make sense of the world.

I will be perfectly honest with you: if I live to be 1,000 years old, I will never really understand gender. I’m a feminist, and there’s a lot about that that I don’t understand, either. I think you’ll find that, as you become a man, there are a lot of things that you won’t understand, either. And that’s okay.

But let’s agree on this: men and women, whatever their differences, are equal. Throughout history, and even today, people forget this. And when they do, things get very, very ugly.

A few days ago, a young girl went to a dance at her high school. And, like many high school kids, she took the opportunity to do something kind of taboo and drank alcohol with her friends.

What happened next was one of those truly awful things that I don’t know how to explain. My baby, some boys only a few years older than you hurt her very badly. Very badly. They did something called “rape.” Rape is when you have sex with someone even though they don’t want to or aren’t able to tell you whether or not they want to.

We’ve talked about sex a little, about how people have sex because they love each other or really like each other in certain ways or they want to make a baby. Sex is a good thing, a fun thing, a beautiful thing. It’s something that I know you will enjoy very much when you are older and ready to handle it.

Rape is a horrible thing. And what made this rape even more upsetting is that many people who knew this girl watched this happen to her. Many people who knew this girl, who sat next to her in class, decided to join in. Many people, who were perhaps this girl’s neighbors, took pictures. Many people could have stopped her from being hurt so badly.

None of them did.

It may seem silly to tell you that there are some things that you must never do. And perhaps the parents of those boys just assumed that they knew better. Or maybe their parents said some mean things about women that led them to believe that hurting girls is not that bad. Or maybe they heard some “logic” that some girls “ask for it.”

Son, you must never, NEVER, rape someone. It is never okay. If you are ever uncertain about whether or not the person you are with wants to have sex with you, you must stop. If you are ever in a situation like those boys were and you see someone being hurt in such a way, you must do what you can to make it stop. Even if you’re scared, even if it means that you’ll lose some friends.

You will hear a lot of, “Well, yeah, but…” conversations about these matters. You will hear a lot about what people should do to avoid being raped. These are certainly good pieces of advice. However, very rarely will you hear advice about what people can do to avoid being rapists.

As your mother, and as a woman, I am here to tell you that it is never okay to rape someone and I don’t care what the circumstances are. I don’t care if there’s a dark, unsafe area. I don’t care if there’s alcohol or drugs involved. I don’t care if there are skimpy clothes or suggestive dancing. I don’t even care if sex is already happening and someone changes their mind.

Just as I would tell you that you must never hit someone (unless, you know, there’s a dire need to do and we’ll discuss that, too), and that you must never kill someone, and that you must never treat someone poorly, you must never rape. Never.

I don’t know how these things happen, and I don’t know what was going through the minds of those boys that night, but I’m willing to bet that no one ever really told them that it was never okay to rape, that no one told them that it was never okay to stand by and watch someone be hurt so badly.

I am telling you that it’s not.

And for as long as I have words to share with you, I am always here to talk to you about it.

Every year since 2001, when the baby was still officially The Fetus, we’ve made a trek to Trax Farms right before Halloween. We fully recognize that driving out to the country for the day to do country-ish things like hay rides and corn mazes and pumpkin picking and cider guzzling is some total City Mouse behavior, but whatever. It’s tradition and I’m pretty sure it’s written in one of my algebra textbooks that after two years, a tradition is never to be questioned.

And every year, the atmosphere at Trax has become increasingly circus-like. I think they’re pushing their fall festival theme a little bit harder and so they keep adding attractions that depart further away from the farm theme. This year there was a Moonbounce and a large inflated Titanic…thing. Because the Titanic crashed in rural Pennsylvania dontchaknow.

And, of course, the number of people making their annual trek to the country from the city and the suburbs has steadily increased. All of these things combined have made our annual trip less and less pleasant.

(I also stopped buying the Trax Farms brand products in the store when I had the revolutionary idea to look at the labels and realized that none of these products were made at Trax Farms, but rather somewhere else for Trax Farms. I guess I had this adorably naive and urban idea of a bunch of ladies draped in, I don’t know, doilies and aprons, toiling somewhere in the back of the farm making apple butter and applesauce from an old family recipe. Yeah, not so much. I’m not sure exactly where their stuff is made, but I don’t think there are any grammies involved and I’m fairly certain that old family recipes don’t include high fructose corn syrup. So, there’s yet another fantasy quashed. Also, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny don’t exist, God hates you, and your elementary school teacher did not, in fact, think that you could be anything you wanted to be. She always knew that you were an idiot.)

A few weeks ago, I suggested that we go to Trax the first week of October. I had several reasons, mostly having to do with our weekends being packed all of October. The husband staunchly refused, saying that that was too early.

Somewhere around mid-October, faced with a frigid and rainy weekend, the husband mused that we should have gone to Trax at the beginning of October. “OH, REALLY?!?!?” I squawked, and he quickly backpedaled and said that my reasons were not freak-weather-related and so therefore I was still wrong to suggest the early outing. He has since relented a tiny bit, and last night declared, that I was “right, but not right-right.”

We decided to sacrifice the first half of the Steelers game and head out to the farm right after the baby’s soccer game. Of course, everyone else had this idea, too. (Note: if you want a peaceful grocery shopping experience, go during a Steeler game. The aisles will be gloriously empty…but you might have a tough time finding hot wings or sandwich rings. Just FYI.) We parked far away from the entrance and had to go through the back entrance of the store, past a Christmas display.

Now, I can’t complain too much, because the crowd did disperse a little, and the pumpkins were still plentiful. However, three things get a huge boo from me:

– Now that I am officially a Soccer Mom, I got the urge to decorate my front porch with some of those hardy mums in gorgeous fall shades. There were about six or seven hardy mums left and they looked as though they had gone on a bender, culminating in a fistfight with the cornstalks.

– The animals in the petting zoo were so overfed from everyone marching in and out of there all day with their cups of grain and baby bottles, that they barely acknowledged our cries of, “Here, goat. Here, goat. Have some dried corn and stuff. Come on.” However, the alpaca obliged us and didn’t seem to mind that I called him, “Mr. Sweater.” Also, some hipsters gave me the stinkeye when I mocked the goats for not having thumbs. Whatever, man. I’m circling the bottom of the food chain. I need to feel superior to someone.

– The corn “maze.” I don’t know if there were budgetary constraints this year or not. But the maze was not tightly packed rows of undulating cornstalks, but rather cornstalks spread out and tied with twine in such a way that I could look through the maze and see most possible routes. And the entrance was also the exit, meaning that if we were competing, I could just go in, hide for a few seconds and then emerge and claim that I had completed the maze in record time. Really, really anticlimactic and not nearly “Shining” enough.

But we acquired pumpkins and a bushel of apples. After watching the glorious Steeler game, the husband made some beef vegetable soup with the help of one of Trax’s soup bags. It’s his annual foray into the kitchen and is like one giant, stereotype-laden sitcom episode, as he yells out to me asking where the knives are and drops things and burns fingers and overflows the sink with dishes and uses the most profane language. The soup was good, though.

Being Harriet to his Ozzie, I made an apple pie. My pies are always delicious, but aesthetically I’m terrible. I have some difficulty with rolling out pie dough. Last night, the dough for the bottom crust was thick in the middle and nearly translucent on the edges, while the dough for the top crust was the opposite.

I also took the requisite picture of my kid in the pumpkin patch, but I haven’t gotten it off of the camera yet. That reminds me, that we managed to avoid that Kodak onslaught. Last year, I was standing next to a woman who plopped her six-month-old on a pumpkin and he was all overstimulated by the crowd that he wouldn’t look at the camera. Instead of just grabbing an equally precious profile shot, the mom was insistent on getting a toothy grin, and kept saying, “Anthony! Anthony! Anthony! Look at mama! Look at mama! Look! Look! Beep beep Beep! Anthony! Anthony! Beep! Boop! Anthony!” I was torn between wanting to fist bump Anthony for not bending to his mother’s inane will and grabbing his head and turning it toward her EasyShare just to make the noise stop.

Mornin’. Here at our house, we are in the midst of that morning-after-a-sickness haze. The baby was off and on “meh” yesterday and I hesitantly left him with my mother-in-law so I could go out with Tracey and her new beau to dinner and then to see the husband DJ at New Amsterdam. I was distracted, thinking about him, and when my mother-in-law called to tell me that the baby was running a fever of 103, I asked the lovebirds to drive me home.

There was some cause for concern as a few kids in his after-school program have had H1N1 recently, but after some Tylenol and Gatorade and cool rags, the fever slowly but surely came down. He crawled into bed with me and we read a few chapters from Coraline. He asked if he could sleep with me and I said of course. When the husband came home, he camped out on the couch.

We just finished some pancakes and hash browns and the fever is barely there now. We’re going to watch some Smurfs DVDs and I’m going to drink a gallon of coffee.

I’m so glad that whatever it was seems to have left. I hate when he is sick. I feel so…isolated, like I can’t reach him or reach in and pull out whatever it is that’s invading his body.

So, it’s been a few days, eh? I had to hunker down and freak out and get over it and move on and take whatever steps that I could. We’ll be okay. I don’t know when and I don’t know exactly how, but we’ll be okay.

The latest thing that had me freaking out was my kid’s performance in school. Perhaps my already keyed-up self was having some perspective trouble, because now that I think about it, a few crummy test scores and shitty attitude toward homework isn’t really all that alarming. But we were REALLY worried/pissed that he kept screwing up basic addition problems and was not able to memorize a list of six Spanish words for the life of him.

I began to think that, on top of everything else that this year had thrown at us, problems with our kid and his learning were really uncalled for.

So I braced myself when we went in for a parent-teacher conference today, only to hear things like, “Outstanding…advanced…gifted.” (I feel the need to stress that I am so NOT a status whore when it comes to things like gifted programs for kids. If the baby can do some extra stuff that interests him, I am happy. I do not think that he is now pre-disposed for “success” and/or better than any other kid.)

Of COURSE he doesn’t always want to do homework or put any serious effort into it. Of COURSE he’s cranky about getting up early. Of COURSE he would rather play than work on arithmetic. He’s a kid. He’s a good kid. And our only mistake as parents was not giving him enough credit.

I know what it is. I know why he doesn’t want to work on homework (besides the fact that homework universally sucks) and why he seems all gibberish and wiggles when we’re home. This morning as we were getting ready, he wanted me to play trains with him and when I said no, we needed to be leaving soon, he asked his dad if he wanted to look at his Egypt book with him. Why does he ask to do these things at 8 a.m? Is he doing that on purpose so that he can say that, technically, his parents never did anything fun with him, even though he timed his requests with the morning rush? Because the morning rush to him is just the start of another long day. Another day where the only time that we see him is when we’re tired from work and worrying about our future. We’re his favorite people and we’re no longer any fun to be around so he tries to push those days away.

I can’t not work and I don’t feel guilty about working (at least not all the time). I enjoy having a career. And the kid still needs to go to school and do homework. These aren’t negotiable. But I guess I need to remind myself to stop waiting for life to get easier because all signs point to “not gonna happen.”

We watched Raising Arizona the other night, just because I had a craving for it and I think my subconscious was trying to tell me something. I always forget about how lovely the end of that movie is and I really needed to hear this:

All parents are strong and wise and capable and all children are happy and beloved.

I’m trying to not think about how far away Starbucks is and how badly I want a Pumpkin Spice Latte, so I started reading back through this blog’s archives and my LiveJournal archives.

October is, perhaps, my favorite month. It’s firmly in fall and has all of fall’s best features. It’s gorgeous to look at and the weather is fantastic. Plus, there’s Halloween, which I love, and my birthday (also on Halloween).

30 days from now, I will turn 31. That number sort of hit me yesterday. I remember talking to a friend last year about turning 30 and she mentioned being totally cool with 30, but 31 kind of got her because she could officially say that she was in her Thirties. 30 sounds kind of cute and grown up. 31 is suddenly, “Oh, this shit is real, huh?”

Anyway, one of the best things that I’ve done in life is to start documenting it on the internet. Honest! I never could commit to a regular diary or journal, but for some reason the internet and I were likethis. Now I can check in with my former self whenever I want.

So, if you like, come check out some past October 1sts with me…
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I have a buddy named Mary. She works a few blocks down the street from me and on occasion, though not nearly often enough, we have what we call businesswomen’s lunches.

On Saturday, Mary went and done got herself hitched.

The happy couple, photographed by the baby.

The husband (that is, my “the husband,” not Mary’s husband) was supposed to be my date, but he punked out. “Ugh. I would have to shower,” he explained. So the baby stepped in as my date.

Not to get all Oedipal on you guys, but he was the best date ever.

He looked incredibly dashing but at the same time cool as heck because he wore his Chuck Taylors upon request of the bride. He also brought some entertainment for himself, that cheapie maze game pictured above, which he kept in his shirt pocket.

He also managed to take a semi-decent picture of me.

That’s me, wearing a red dress (scandalous), and trying to fit another White Russian in despite the faint weeping that I could hear coming from my foundation garment. Plus, I don’t normally drink White Russians, but I saw the half and half at the bar, and there was a faint Big Lebowski vibe in the air, so I rolled with it.

We had a lovely time and since it was a special occasion, I let the baby have two Pepsis. Then he sort of…bubbled over…onto the dance floor.

I sometimes feel like, when introducing my kid to new groups of people, that I should put out a disclaimer ahead of time. “He’s 7 going on 40. He has the shit-talking abilities of someone three times his age. He’s into really weird things like Godzilla and Kraftwerk and Detroit hip-hop and John Carpenter movies. He is not at all shy about speaking frankly to adults. He is one of the biggest characters you will ever meet.” I’m always nervous that he’s going to say or do something out of line, but so far (and maybe he’s just still cute enough to get away with it) he’s charmed the pants off of everyone he’s met.

So when he hit the dance floor on Saturday and immediately launched into some Bangles-esque Egyptian walking and The Robot, the wedding guests nearly fell over. As he got warmed up and more comfortable, he turned things up and eventually, there was this:

Unfortunately, the picture is dark but that is indeed my child giving the goat after some very intense air guitar.

But the best part of my son escorting me to the wedding was the fact that he gladly slow danced with me and gave me a sweet little kiss at the end.

Indeed, any future girlfriends will have to fight me for him.

I call this postpourri. Get it? Potpourri but in blog post form? And, yes, Tyler Durden, being clever is working out for me just fine.

Anyway, I wrote on MamaPop yesterday about the Sundance Channel’s mini-documentary-series Brick City. Part 3 of 5 aired last night. I think I’m a little too cynical to be really inspired by the efforts of Mayor Cory Booker. I mean, good on him for giving a shit and all. I think I’ve just lost faith in politicians having any higher callings than their own professional ambitions to propel them to action. And even then their “actions” are lukewarm and tentative and serve bullshit. *coughcoughObamacough* But I’m really, really drawn in by Jayda and Creep. I guess it’s the parenting aspect. Seeing those two just in it and trying so hard to be good people and struggling with the fact that they’re bringing new people into this questionable world hits me pretty hard.

Onto the lighter stuff. If you’ve spent any time around me, you’ve probably heard me whine about my kitchen. It’s small, though that’s not the main problem. There are three doorways, plus two covered-up doorway things. One was the servants’ entrance and the other I think might have housed shelves at one point. Plus, there’s a covered-up fireplace. The result is the most inefficient use of space ever. The previous owner’s home improvement skills were lacking at best and so his solution when it came time to update the kitchen back in nineteen-seventy-hell or whenever this perversion of home improvement went down was this crap:

That little slab on the right is the extent of my counter space. I do nearly all prep work on the stove and it’s only by sheer luck that I haven’t cut off a finger while chopping on a rickety cutting board perched on one of the burners. If you stop by for dinner, it’s likely that you’ll hear, “Just gonna chop this carrot. *chopchopchop* AUUGHHH OH JESUS. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Okay. Whew, they’re all still there. EVERYTHING’S FINE!”

Obviously, redoing the kitchen into something resembling reasonable, much less the gourmet pr0n version that I now want after working in this hell hole for 3 years, will require a LOT of money. And if there’s a perfect antonym to our personal finances, “a lot” would be it.

So, since I’m usually trying to make dinner here after a long work/school day, I’m often flustered and pissy and saying many disrespectful things about the kitchen’s mother. This results in some odd placements of items on my part and some questionable uses of space. Some are benign (“Why is the fucking muffin pan in the microwave?”) and some are more serious. The top of my stove houses the tea kettle, a lunch box or two, and my cast iron skillet and grill pan. (I was keeping those last two in the oven but always, without fail, forgot that they were in there and would preheat the motherfucker and in case you didn’t know, cast iron cookware gets hellaciously hot and even oven mitts are barely a match.)

Sometimes, the cast iron skillet becomes a temporary storage space. Like, for instance, about a month ago I needed some place to set a tomato and a new bag of brown sugar and a mixing bowl. Into the skillet went the tomato and the brown sugar and on top of them went the mixing bowl. And there they remained, forgotten, until last night.

I’m not sure what made me look in there, but I’m sure you won’t be surprised that I was confronted with rotten tomato ooze that was causing weird reactions in the skillet and coating the bag of brown sugar. And a smell that was somewhere between garbage juice and the Allegheny River that one time that my dad, the dog, and I went for an ill-advised swim and my mom wouldn’t let us near the house for the better part of a day.

I recoiled and in doing so knocked over a cup of chocolate milk and a cup of vegetable juice (that’s what goes for balanced nutrition in our house) that the baby had left on the stove. I then spent the next hour transferring the brown sugar to a new bag and attempting to rid the skillet of the smell so that we don’t have Cornbread with Garbage Juice the next time that we have chili. FML.

At the bus stop the other day, the baby hit me with yet another of his non-sequitur questions: “Are people in Antartica upside down?” Certainly, this a pretty typical question for someone his age and appropriately adorable. However, we sort of got into it.

“No. Well, there are only a few people in Antartica. They’re scientists doing research. But they’re not in Antartica hanging from the ceiling. They’re standing up just like we are. The earth is round and gravity keeps everything on the ground. There’s no real up or down or left or right in space, you know?”

“Yes, there is.”

“No, not really. Directions like up and down and left and right are things that people made up so that they can make sense of the world. But in space, where earth is, everything is going in every direction. Kind of.”

“What?”

“Well, scientists are pretty sure that that universe began because of a big bang, that there was this, like, ball of energy and matter and one day it exploded sending stuff in every possible direction and those bits and pieces sometimes bumped into each other and blended and became new planets and galaxies and stuff.”

“Like how Saturn’s moon exploded and formed its rings?”

“Yeah, kind of like that.”

“Do you think you could ice skate on Saturn’s rings?”

“Well, no. I mean, besides the fact that it’s, you know, Saturn, remember how on that show we watched they explained that even though Saturn’s rings look solid, they’re actually lots of bits and pieces of rock and dust?”

“Oh, yeah!”

“It’s like…there was this artist, Monet. And his paintings, if you’re far away, look like water lillies and people relaxing in the park. But if you get up close you can see all of the little dots and strokes and when you look at his paintings really closely they don’t make sense. And like the cells that make up your body, too.”

“Not my skin, though.”

“Your skin, too! Your skin is made up of tiny cells that clump together and cover your body. It’s called perspective.”

“I know about perspective!”

“You do?”

“Yeah!”

“Good.”

I swear to god we had this conversation and only stopped because the school bus came. It was especially timely because I really, really need some perspective right now. Not the “there are billions of people who have it way worse than me” kind. I have that in spades. I need the “I’m looking at my 30-year-old self from a few years in the future and laughing at her because why didn’t she realize that everything was going to be just fine?” I would like that perspective in bulk, please.

I’m feeling rather…jazzed today. It’s kind of odd because it’s all grey and rainy today. But I think the gloomy weather reset something internally for me. It’s been sunny and nice pretty much every day for the last two weeks and that’s just not how we do it in Pittsburgh. Dashing through the rain from the bus stop, I thought, “Ahhh, yes. This feels right.”

I’m probably just excited about being off Thursday and Friday. Thursday my office is closed for G20 shizz and Friday I’m taking off because I imagine my commute will still be hellish. Plus, the baby has off of school and it’s the husband’s birthday. Getting to spend two days in a row at home with those dudes makes me happy, apparently. Ew.

The rain also gives that first real kiss of autumn. I’m so ready for that season to really get here. I’m getting that baking urge hardcore. I have 10,000 recipes starred in Google Reader that I want to try. I was thinking this morning that I might do some hybrid of NaBloPoMo and Tuesdays with Dorie, where I make myself bake one or two things every weekend and share the results with you. I’m not trying to become a food blogger or anything but fall baking is the awesome and since I’ve been having trouble finding inspiration/energy to post here, the combination seems natural.