Sorry i couldn't come up with a more interesting headline! It's just my usual meandering musings.

Worked at the food pantry on saturday, but it mostly involved waiting around for the food donation dropoffs with about another 15 people, so i left around 1 pm as i had my own errands to do and figured there was plenty of help without me.

stopped at the health food store to pick up some oil of peppermint and wheat bran. The peppermint's for the mice, the bran for my cat. I'm going to dip cotton balls in the oil of peppermint and place these strategically in crevices above the sill plate on the back wall of my basement, where the mice are getting in. Mice reportedly hate the smell of peppermint, so soon my basement will smell like candy canes! I hate dealing with dead mice in mousetraps.

My mom dropped by Saturday to pick up oodles of office supplies i salvaged from my office. They don't think they're worth the cost of shipping them to our HQ, so they said i can help myself to all sorts of stuff. I took some, and saved some for my mother and friend H.

Not dating anyone these days, i spent my saturday night doing what i remember doing on and off for the past 20 years: watching Cops and then America's Most Wanted. I browsed thru Better Homes & Gardens during the commercials.

On Sunday friend H. and i went down to trader joe's, then hit 3 places before we found a place open for lunch. The Italian place we 1st planned on going to is so close to the mall, and it was mobbed (as was the mall). This surprised me, as we're still a week before Thanksgiving. Then on to a middle eastern restaurant, which was closed, then another spot, also closed. We settled on a diner type place where the food was quite generic, but by that point i was starving so I gave in. I had a tuna melt and fries.

Back at home, i was fighting the usual mid-day sleepiness, but still managed to do about an hour and a half's worth of raking leaves. Me thinks i'm the only person left on the globe who still uses a rake rather than a shrill-sounding, ear throbbing leaf blower. My neighbors will all be deaf one day, but at least they'll have tidy lawns.

Managed to vacuum the whole house, thank god. After about 3 weeks, you start seeing dust bunnies. Between my long hair and my cat's, we sure know how to make stuff grow in the corners of the room. Housecleaning is not my forte, altho if i ever have anyone coming over, the place is spotless.

Never got to use the free pair of concert tickets i had gotten. My friend, you see, had totally FORGOTTEN the night of the concert. Good thing i called him. No biggie, i had mixed feelings about schlepping an hour down there anyway. So i hit the town's book discussion club meeting instead, which i hadn't done in over a year. It was a very good discussion (about 6 women and 1 man), so i'm glad i went. Most of the people there were the same ones I'd remembered from a few years ago.

I just spent $84 on a caged, 3-tube bird feeder. Too much money, i know, but you've got to understand that bird feeding is one of my really big hobbies, especially when there's not much else to do in winter. And I've been doing volunteer research for over 12 years now. My 2 remaining single tube feeders are pretty banged up by the squirrels, tho still functional, tho this may be their last season.

The main problem is that they hold less seed and i find myself having to go out there to refill them every 2 days. After steadily feeding the birds in my neighborhood, often on a year-round basis, for many years, i have a healthy population of chickadees, titmice, red and white-breasted nuthatches, blue jays, mourning doves, cardinals, sparrows, finches, juncoes, woodpeckers, etc. Those are just the regulars. I've also seen orioles, indigo buntings, warblers, towhees, red-breasted grosbeaks...that's the thrill of the hunt. You never know what may show up.

With a bigger feeder I'll more than double my seed capacity so i don't have to freeze my butt off in the dead of winter, and i can still entertain myself and do my bird counts from the comfort of my (relatively) heated house.

I am also going to spend some money on a tension rod and insulated curtains for the set of french doors leading to my family room. The doors, since they're interior doors, are single pane glass, but each winter i close off the family room becus it's the only room heated by expensive electric heat and i don't use or need to use that room, so i put draft dodgers at the bottom. But i'm sure that glass still conducts a lot of cold, as that room is totally unheated and it sits over my unheated garage.

So i've been in the market for a nice decorative tension rod; there's not much to choose from online, most of them are shower curtain rods, but i saw something that would work at JC Penney. And i'm waiting for color swatches for the curtains. I'm thinking solid tan as my living room, which lies on this side of those french doors, has a lot of bold color in it already, namely purple. Getting this up will be one of my projects after my job ends.

I was reading something somewhere about a guy with an old house who was using 800 gallons of oil each heating season, which seemed like an awful lot, so i got out all my old oil bills and added it up. For the last 2 years, i only used about 380 gallons of oil to heat my house; last year i used about 70 gallons less than the year before. I think last winter was pretty mild, right, so that would explain it. I aim to be on track this winter with the same kind of low usage, perhaps even lower.