November cometh

Halloween and beautiful October are over, and here comes dull, brown November. In fact, it is still very pretty out there, but it won't last. We've got a storm coming in tonight that's supposed to bring rain and snow, and then some form of "weather" is predicted for at least a part of every day this week. We get a little break from Monday afternoon until Tuesday afternoon, but then it comes back. Days and days of rain and snow should take down all the pretty leaves that are still clinging to the branches.

A good week for the time change! We are going to appreciate that extra sleep. This morning I woke up at 9:15 (old time). I hope 7 am tomorrow (8 am old time) won't feel too early.

I have been very successful in putting the election out of my mind, not reading articles about it, etc., but now it's in two days, and pretty soon I won't be able to ignore it. Ignore the results, that is. I hope they are good, but I can't even let myself think about that. 

Rocket Boy has been enjoying being back in Colorado the last few days by walking the streets, handing out leaflets and reminding people to vote. The thing is, the decision won't be made in Colorado. Colorado does have some important things on the ballot, but truly, it's not my state I'm worried about.

We had a pleasant Halloween this year. I didn't feel good, of course, due to stupid Mounjaro, so I didn't get around to carving any of our pumpkins until very late in the day. In fact, it wasn't until Rocket Boy got busy and carved one (on the left) that I finally decided I felt up to carving one (on the right). Trick-or-treaters started arriving while I was carving, that's how late I was. I gave up and drew a cat face on the little white one, and we had a fourth pumpkin that wasn't even touched. (The twins considered themselves too old to participate.)

I didn't feel like cooking, so we got takeout Chinese. That was a good choice.

Rocket Boy didn't bring down the Halloween decorations until the 30th, so I didn't do much with those. I didn't even get out my little dolls. "Next year," I said. It didn't bother me at all. You don't have to do everything every year. The cats, however, did wear their costumes (involuntarily). We got a new one for Sillers this year at Target: she's a wizard, I think. It fit her a little better than her old witch costume, but it still kept moving around until it looked more like a bib than a cape. Baby Kitty wore his lovely candy corn collar for most of the night, until Rocket Boy took pity on him and removed it.

We didn't actually do much that night, just sat around in the living room and waited for those knocks on the door. I wanted to watch something spooky, but Rocket Boy found a documentary on PBS about what really happened to the little princes in the Tower of London, so we watched that. A fairly late trick-or-treater was holding a (quite realistic) toy gun as part of his costume, and for just a moment I was nervous. After he and his sister left I thought, should we really be sitting here with the front door open and the storm door unlocked? What if a desperate homeless person shows up? But of course they didn't.

We had lots and lots of kids come to the door, but I had purchased so much candy that we had a lot left over. Smarties and Tootsie pops. I like Tootsie pops, even on Mounjaro, but Smarties don't do much for me. It's going to take a while to empty the bowl. We also still have M&Ms left over from what I bought weeks ago to have around for snacking. M&Ms don't appeal to me anymore, and the kids are not into them either, so there they sit. It's very strange.

I'll stick the Mounjaro report in here. I went up to 7.5 mg this week, and the effect was noticeable.

• Weight the morning I took my first shot: 254.6
• Weight last Sunday: 234.6
• Weight this Sunday morning (after 20+ weeks on Mounjaro): 231
  

I was so sick this week! For the first three days after the shot I didn't want to eat at all. Thus, the 3.6 lb weight loss. This brings me to 23.6 pounds down in a little over 20 weeks, for an average of 1.18 lbs per week. I like the fact that I lost some weight, but I don't like how sick I felt. I'm hoping this week will be a little better... or maybe in a few weeks I'll feel better. No matter what the results of the election are, this is going to be a stressful week.

In preparation for the storm that's coming in, Rocket Boy and I decided to rake leaves today. (I moved my car across the street in order to work on the driveway.) I guess I should have taken an "after" shot too, but you can imagine it -- just a bare driveway. It's really much prettier with all the orange leaves, but slippery. In deference to my age and likelihood of slipping on things, I swept all the leaves into the compost bin.

It is very hard to rake these little leaves (from the honey locust). I gave up on the rake and used a broom.

We are gradually adjusting to Rocket Boy being here. I vacillate between being delighted to have him here and being annoyed by all the unnecessary things he brought with him. Our house is simply overflowing with his belongings. Of course he can't bring himself to throw anything away, so we keep running into problems. There was one box that was full of twist-ties, I kid you not. I saved a few good ones and tossed the rest. He brought several boxes of tea with him, naturally, but our tea cupboard was already full to bursting. So I reached in, pulled out a couple of boxes of tea I don't like, and tossed their contents in the trash, pushing the teabags down under other garbage so RB wouldn't be tempted to get them out again. He was horrified, but now we have room for his tea.

But other stuff is more of a problem. For instance, he brought with him three glass measuring cups -- a 1-cup, a 2-cup, and a 4-cup. These are identical to my glass measuring cups. "We can give yours to Goodwill," I said. He agreed, but they are still sitting on the dining room table, and in fact, he used one of his the other day and it is currently in the dishwasher.

He brought so much food with him. We've agreed that we'll plan menus based on what's in our cupboards until we get it down to the point where we can actually close the cupboards.

But it's so fun to have him here, to be able to talk to him at any time of day. It makes me so happy when I look over at him each morning, even though we're having some trouble sleeping together in that tiny, uncomfortable bed. Maybe this winter we'll finally bite the bullet and get a new mattress. And maybe Mounjaro will help me get small enough that we fit better. 

The kids, I think, are reacting to his presence somewhat differently. Neither one seems very happy about it. Teen A got very angry at ME on Wednesday, because I wouldn't let him drive our new car to school. I had agreed, the week before, to let him drive to TEC that afternoon, and I had said he could do it again this week. But he thought I meant he could drive to the high school in the morning. I did not mean that, and I held firm. (If I let him do it on Wednesdays, what's to stop him from doing it every day? And besides, I specifically told our insurance agent that he would not be driving to school. Plus, his provisional license means he can't drive anyone else under 18, and I think the temptation to give a friend a ride would be too great.) He stomped off to catch the bus, and when he came home at lunchtime to get the car, he left without speaking to me. After that, he maintained an angry silence for the next few days. I don't think he spoke to me again until Saturday, and even then it was only a monosyllable or two. He did not speak to Rocket Boy either, and RB found this very upsetting. I've experienced Teen A's sulks before and I know they will pass more quickly if I just let them play out. But this may have been a first for Rocket Boy.

Usually he starts speaking to me again within a day or two, but as this sulk dragged on, I did some online research. The expert consensus seemed to be that a child who goes silent feels overwhelmed by the things he wants to say but feels he can't. And I thought, I wonder if this isn't just about the car. Maybe it's also about Teen A's feelings about Rocket Boy coming home. After all, it's a pretty drastic change in his life.

He's speaking to us now, but he's still angry. He hasn't told me a joke since this started. Just now I guilted him into helping Rocket Boy work on the yard for a while. (I also paid him $10, for maybe 15 minutes of work.) I think it was good for them to work together, even briefly.

We'll get through this transition, I think. But I should remember that it isn't easy.

Well, I should probably finish this post up now. I need to go to the grocery store and clean the litter boxes and help the kids with homework and put away the laundry and clean the kitchen. And do something about dinner. November has started and I have many things to get done this month. There are only three full weeks of school before Fall Break, and one of those weeks actually only has four days, due to Veterans Day. I am planning to work on my next middle grade mystery this month -- I finished the October installment a year or two ago, and I haven't had much luck working on November since then. But I got a good idea for it a week or two ago, so I'm going to try to run with that. Rocket Boy starts his new job on Wednesday, so I'll need something to occupy my mind while he works. Of course there's always reading. I started a 614-page biography of Herbert Hoover yesterday. Nothing like Herbert Hoover to put you in a November mood.

Reading post: Franz Kafka in October

Beautiful October is over, so it is time for a reading post. In October I decided to read books by Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Why Kafka? I'm not sure, actually. I just know that when I started this project, his was a name that came to mind right away. I think it's partly because he still comes up a lot. When people want to refer to a terrible, unfair, senseless situation, especially involving government bureaucracy, they mention Kafka. But I'm not sure how many people still read him. And since the only thing I'd ever read by him was "The Metamorphosis," I figured I owed Kafka some of my time.

• Collected Stories by Franz Kafka (Everyman's Library). I decided to begin with the stories, because they say that's how you really get to know Kafka, although I was reluctant. I don't love short stories and tend to avoid collections of them. The edition I found at the library includes 41 stories published in his lifetime and 43 published by his friend Max Brod after Kafka's death. The "stories" range from a single paragraph to more than 50 pages long. Some of them aren't really stories, they're just brief weird descriptions. But the actual stories are pretty weird too. I was surprised to find that I really liked them. After I'd read a few I thought, I'm enjoying myself. I didn't have to push myself to read them, I wanted to read them. The unpublished stories weren't as good -- presumably hadn't been revised as much, plus Kafka hadn't chosen them to be published -- but I liked some of them.
  
  I didn't like his long, later animal stories: "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk"; "Investigations of a Dog"; "The Burrow." But I loved some of the others. "The Metamorphosis" is better and sadder than I remembered. "In the Penal Colony" is chilling. "A Country Doctor" is amazing, as are many of the stories that were published with it. And among the unpublished stories I loved "The Proclamation." It's just a few paragraphs, a page and a half. In a tenement building, someone distributes a strange "proclamation" that encourages people to come and borrow some of his five broken toy rifles so they can join together in some sort of unexplained protest. But as the narrator of the story says,
  

  "Nobody in our house has the time or the wish to read proclamations, let alone to think them over. Before long the little sheets of paper were floating in the current of filth that, starting from the attics and fed by all the corridors, pours down the staircase and there struggles with the opposing current that swirls up from below."

  Eventually there is another proclamation which states that nobody has responded to the first proclamation. And that's the end of the story. Positively Kafkaesque.
  
  
• The Trial (1925). Kafka didn't publish any novels while he was alive, but this is one of three that were published posthumously. It took me a while to get into it, but once I did, I enjoyed it. The thing about Kafka that I never understood before is that he's funny. I thought this would be a depressing book, but it isn't, even though the main character, Joseph K., gets into a terrible situation, apparently through no fault of his own. We, and he, never learn what he has been accused of, nor how the mechanism of his trial is proceeding, while at the same time, everyone he meets seems to know something about "his case" already.
  
  The whole story reads like a bad dream, with some parts more dreamlike than others. For instance, after he is "arrested," he is allowed to continue with his normal life, living in a sort of rooming house and working at a bank. Then he is summoned to his first "interrogation," his first official meeting in court (weirdly, in a tenement building), but he is not told what time it will be held, nor where in the tenement building it will take place. He finally finds the court in session on the fifth floor, but the "interrogation" is soon interrupted by a sexual assault taking place in the corner. A few days later he is working late at the bank when he hears "convulsive sighs" coming from a storeroom. He opens the door and finds the two men who "arrested" him, being whipped by a third man. The next day he looks in the storeroom again and they are still there. So bizarre.
  

I decided not to go on and read The Castle this month. I could have, but I think I got a good dose of Kafka from these two books. I also think I might someday read it on my own, because now I know that Kafka is fun. Who would have thought? It was as much of a surprise as when I read Moby-Dick a few years ago and loved it. I also want to find a copy of the stories for my collection, but I'm just going to watch out for them, not buy them from Amazon.

Other reading...

After finishing Kafka's short stories, I took a break and read Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, which finally arrived at the library. I updated my September reading post to reflect that. Very good book. She should write more nonfiction.

I also read some spooky books. 

• Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay was OK, although most of the spookiness was early in the book. 
• The latest Phil Rickman novel, The Fever of the World, was just terrible and not spooky at all. 
• The graphic novel version of Took: A Ghost Story, Mary Downing Hahn's middle grade novel, was very nicely done, quite spooky.
• The Silence of the Sea by Yrsa Sigurdardottir was not really a ghost story, just a few ghostly bits. It was OK.
• And finally, on October 31st I read the last story in The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories, edited by J. A. Cuddon. Reading that all month was a fun project, though most of the stories were not that scary. Some were!

October is supposed to be the month to read books from the tall bookcase by the front door, but I just didn't get to any.

In November I need another woman writer and after a great deal of deliberation I've chosen Louise Erdrich. I've already read several books by her (7 according to my master list), but she's written so many that I still have about 26 others to choose from. Reading books about Indians seems to fit with November -- because of Thanksgiving, I guess, and also somehow because of Election Day, and Veterans Day, and because it's kind of a sad time of year. So that'll be November, and I'm also going to try to read a biography of Herbert Hoover. And whatever else comes up.