November

After the month that Halloween ate, November offered a welcome slowing down of pace.

The kitchen remodel stretched out longer than planned for all the normal reasons that remodels do, but we're really happy with the results. This whole thing started because the layout of the kitchen is sort of weird– it's essentially a long, wide galley kitchen, but the previous owners (who did the last remodel about a decade ago) had left a fair chunk of space empty to use as a breakfast nook. That sounds normal, but the breakfast nook was literally right next to the dining room, and the idea of side-by-side tables never made any sense to us, so we struggled with what to do with what was essentially dead space. The other weirdness of the layout is that the pantry is, inconveniently enough, in a different room. So we decided to extend cabinets to the end of the room, and now we have an in-kitchen pantry and a bar space for all of our beverage needs.

Since we were going to have to get new countertops to cover the new cabinets anyway, we ditched the old, dark granite ones and replaced them with something much lighter. We also decided to do a backsplash with this massive textured tile, which we fell in love with the second we saw it– the tumbling blocks pattern reminds us of Carol's quilts. The other major change was getting rid of the old oven hood, which didn't really go with the style of the kitchen and, to add insult to that injury, didn't even work. Turns out that there is no style of hood that I actually like the aesthetics of, so we had a custom box made. And we painted the small amount of remaining wall space a really pale blue. It is so much brighter and more usable for us now.

Other November things:

Oscar's first trimester of fifth grade went really well, and he brought home all As in his report card. He got to celebrate this achievement with ice cream– twice, it turns out. (We took him out for a special dessert, but he also gets to go to an ice cream party with his principal.)

Jeremy and I got to see a great, "revolutionary"-themed symphony performance that paired two contemporary composers with Beethoven's Fifth. Colorado Springs Symphony has a new musical director, a young French woman with a great sense of humor and energy, and this performance was really exciting. The next day, we headed up to the Denver Art Museum for the Pissarro exhibit, which we loved. Then, on the way home, we stopped at the outlets, where Oscar picked out a pair of Batmobile Crocs, just in case he was getting too cultured.

My friend Summer came back to Denver for a conference, so she and I got to make a return visit to A Stitching Store, this time with her friend Shelby. This store continues to be an extremely fun and expensive place to visit, so I'm never going to be sad about having excuses to go there. I also joined them and a few other folks who were in town for the same conference for dinner, which made me nostalgic for the days of conference reunions with friends (one of the things I will probably always miss about academia).

Jeremy ran the Colorado Cold Rush for the fourth year in a row, and he did it about an hour faster than he expected to. (This race starts down the street from our house and usually is actually cold, but this year it was a Sunny and 50 Degrees Rush.)

And then, of course, there was Thanksgiving. Because Oscar gets the whole week off from school, we are able to make it to Texas every year for Jeremy's favorite holiday. We got to see some good friends and spend some excellent and much-needed time with family. We also got to enjoy my sister's new house now that all of the finishing touches have been done (and I got to use a fifty-year-old oven for the first time). On Friday, Jeremy's dad had us all over so that the kids had another afternoon to play, and he shared some of his slides from his time in Vietnam with all of us. Obviously, this first Thanksgiving without Carol was hard for everyone, but we spent time telling stories about her.

We came home to find that my little hydrogardens had started producing (teeny tiny) cherry tomatoes and jalapenos. I somehow didn't expect the plants to get quite as huge as they have.

We also got back just in time for the first snow of the season on the last day of November. This is an unusually late first snow, and we keep hearing wildly different assessments of what it means– so we will either have an extremely mild winter or the worst winter in memory.

Books:

• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier: My neighborhood book club picked this one when we realized that the majority of us had never read it, despite its obviously being a classic. I knew the basic shape of the plot, but I wasn't prepared for the level of detail in the descriptions and the specific, authentic representation of what the basically adolescent narrator experiences emotionally.
• The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende: I went into this novel expecting it to be lyrical and lovely to read, but it actually feels very info-dumpy and clunky. The topic and stories are important, no question, but the style diminishes them.
• Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry: My general sense is that I like Emily Henry's books, but aside from Book Lovers, I can't actually tell them apart or remember anything about them. The characters in this one may be the most forgettable yet.
• The Other Side of Now by Paige Harbison: A quick little story about friendship and love in the general mode of Sliding Doors. The protagonist, a TV star, decides to take a break from her life and finds herself in her other life– the one she would have lived if she had gone to Ireland for college with her best friend (who, it happens, is dead in her normal life). Nothing groundbreaking, but in some ways the narrator's voice and the level of detail make it feel more grounded in reality than many books that don't include a fantasy element.

TV:

• Wayward: This stars Mae Martin and Toni Collette, both of whom I love, and has a creepy-but-not-scary premise tied to a reform school in a small Vermont town in 2003.
• Stranger Things: I decided to do a solo rewatch of the first four seasons before the final episodes drop, and I was struck by several things, most especially the depth of the sophomore slump that is season 2. Otherwise, though, this show really is a pretty impressive example of world-building that takes young people's imaginations and experiences seriously, even if the adults around them don't always learn that lesson.

Movies:

• Bugonia: I think I may be becoming a bit of a Lanthimos fan girl, because I enjoyed the hell out of this. It is weird, of course, but possibly the least weird of his movies that I have seen. The performances are excellent across the board, and the way this film uses sound is fascinating.
• Now You See Me, Now You Don't: This is the third and possibly dumbest of the franchise, but it is still fun, especially because Rosamund Pike is obviously having a great time as the villain. (And she absolutely nails her South African accent.)
• The Ballad of Wallis Island: This is a moving little story about loneliness and lost love, but it's also extremely funny because Tim Key knows how to skirt right up to the edge of awkward without making things irredeemably cringe.

I set aside my temperature stitch for the whole month to work on Christmas trees and to play with this new variegated thread, but I will hopefully pick it up again soon.