I was outside chatting with one of my neighbors and I asked her if she liked the house color. She said she had been worries, but really did like it and I mentioned how opposed Steve was to a blue house.

This neighbor is also a widow and she said, “Just say, ‘Honey, if you wanted an opinion, you should have stuck around.'”

It was perfect.

Non-widowed people might not get how much freedom comes from widowhood. It’s bought at too terrible a cost, and it isn’t worth it. But it’s there.

And, honey, the house is blue the way you never wanted. Sorry you missed it.

I started singing this song the other day, and now it WON’T LEAVE MY HEAD. I begin to think I’ll need to burn the place down to drive it out.

Today’s goal will be to substitute this song.

This has been your Big Band Minute.

I receive recipes in my email every day, and since Thanksgiving started looming I’ve been receiving Thanksgiving-appropriate recipes. What does this really mean? Recipe after recipe of cranberry relish.

Listen, people. I don’t want your steenkin’ cranberry relish. I want canberries. If it isn’t shaped like the can, it does not get a place on my plate. You don’t have to eat them. That leaves more disks of jellied goodness for me.

Canberries. It’s what’s for (Thanksgiving) dinner.

I’ve read lots of places where people have worrited and fretted about how much information is available online. It is a veritable stalkers’ paradise at times.

Last night, while on the phone with someone who was in a location I’ve never been, I could pull up Google maps and street views and satellite images and do a time-delayed stalk.

I also discovered that anyone who cares to know can read up about my house, though the auditor’s office says I have four bedrooms (it’s three) and a finished basement (it’s not). It was strange to find out how many square feet I have by looking it up online. I begin to think there will eventually be a Wikipedia page for every one of us, and we’ll learn to consult it to find out what we did last Tuesday* and how we feel about Mark McGwire**.

We have so much information and so little privacy, but I’m willing to trade some of the latter for some of the former. I just hope I never get cameras in here. This amount of dorkiness is catching once seen.

* Very little.
** Very little.

I was whining last month about how I was dreading Christmas. What with one thing and another, I’ve decided to conquer the Christmas Dreadies with a trip to Las Vegas.

I don’t gamble, though I do have a hot date to play bingo which might send me into a spiral of debauchery–B4, and after!

As I write this, I’m sulking at home because I’ve had to turn the water off, at least mostly, while waiting for a plumber to come fix a leaky pipe. Maybe I’ll leave for Vegas a little early.

Because you can never have too much Blarney. Or Animal.

The house isn’t done, but there was a sunny day (turns out it was too sunny) so I decided to grab the opportunity to take a picture.

You can tell I had the camera out.

Here is the hat my sister made for me.

Straight on:

And the money shot:

Putting the hat on requires an “I’ve got a sock monkey hat” dance. Someday, I’ll take a video of that.

I took pictures of the hair and made sure I took them in the same room and the same lighting. Strangely, they didn’t come out looking like the same lighting, but they do look like exactly the same hair color. My glasses are photosensitive and I had just come inside.

This is before:

And this is after:

One person asked me if I had lightened my hair, so apparently it’s visible in some lights, but not in my house!

About the just-ended World Series:

And then: That team that spent $50 million more than any other team, that team with three sure Hall of Famers and as many as four others, that team that bought Milwaukee’s [Cleveland’s] best pitcher and Anaheim’s best hitter and Toronto’s No. 2 starter and Boston’s favorite Idiot and the most expensive player in the history of baseball and so on, that team will win the World Series, and spray champagne on each other, and they will tell you that they won because they came together as a group and kept pulling themselves off the ground and didn’t listen to the doubters.