Like virtually every other shirt or dress I've ever owned, it wants to slide off my shoulders. I'd blame my utter lack of sewing skills, but they've picked up more than their share of blame for this project. My shoulders just point down and entropy, like gravity, goes along for the ride.

I finished all principal sewing on my Halloween costume tonight. In fact, I am wearing it, breathless and giggling, as I write these words; I am giving my body a few minutes to relearn how to sit properly in a dress of this type.Scratch 'relearn.' I've never worn anything remotely like this.

I know we covered this with breathless abandon over at geek-chick.net, but I couldn't let another day go by without discussing Vanessa Carlton's upcoming album on my site. For those of you who haven't heard, you should take a look at Vanessa Carlton's interview/blurb available at Rolling Stone. Let me start with a choice quote:

At long last - you can now search through entries and comments on domesticat. I know, I know, this feature has been years in coming, and I know that a couple of you (*ahem*Geof*ahem*) have been wanting this feature implemented for quite a while now.

Some people find dust bunnies and old papers when they move. For me, scissors and pens vanish from my grasp, and lie embryonic and unseen in overlooked corners, until it is time to move or clean. Suddenly, they gestate, and every room suddenly births scissor twins and quadruplet pens, to my confusion and Jeff's annoyance.

As days go, not bad.

Fall has awakened the cotton gin near our house, and tipped the edges of a few early-adopter leaves with gold. Each day brings a different number of bales of raw cotton piled up near the side of the road. Bales, not in the sense of man-sized or tractor-sized, but eighteen-wheeler-sized; one enormous bale per truck.

We drove off to dinner, Jeff and I, and he cocked an eyebrow toward the field of bales and wondered aloud how the owners of the cotton gin moved the bales from field to truck. In the four years we've lived here, I've never seen a bale loaded from the field onto a truck, and only in the past couple of days have I seen a bale being deposited onto the field in the first place. They simply appear during the quiet of late morning or late night, when no one is around to see their arrival.

By such things are the seasons marked.

Since you didn't ask, a few explanations, on this, a birthday. Heavy on the cryptic, but if someone ever said that we were supposed to be self-explanatory on our birthdays, he was shot before his message reached me.

One for each year: