Never did get that extra hour's sleep. Knees were still hurting, and James got up early due to (yet another) call of nature, so we were up and going before nine o'clock, even though we leisurely ate breakfast and I took Tucker out, but all he wanted to do was to hunt down raccoons.

(We had a strange postscript to the raccoon story. When I pulled up Facebook this morning, another neighbor down the street was responding to the Facebook post I'd put on the neighborhood association page. While we were rousing ourselves out of bed this morning, the raccoon had wandered into her yard. Well, her family has big dogs, Italian mastiffs, and one went after the raccoon and killed it. Sadly, it wandered into the wrong yard. I hope the dog was okay.)

We had forgotten to get onions (again; I have no idea how this keeps happening the way both of us love onions!), so we combined a short grocery trip along with our fun trip this morning. We went to the Kroger on Dallas Highway because it was across the street from our destination and picked up the onions and a few more things that added themselves to the list. Once again, it was chilly enough for us to be wearing flannel shirts, so we had no qualms about stuffing some meats and two frozen pot pies into an insulated bag and heading across the street. We were headed to Hallmark first to return a duplicate ornament, but they weren't open yet, so we went to Barnes & Noble instead to kill the 45 minutes until they did. (As if we couldn't fritter that much time away in a bookstore!) James used a coupon on a book he's been waiting on, and I bought the newest Christmas edition of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books along with "Just Cross Stitch."

Finally it was after noon, so James got his refund and I bought a Christmas gift, then we stopped at Yankee Candle so I could get air freshener for my car. I have no idea what's gotten into Yankee Candle. This is just a little store; maybe the larger one at Town Center Mall is still okay, but this one seems to stock only YC's new line of "trendy" looking candles (I can't explain them; they have fancy jars and stuff) and a smaller selection of scents, and the newer scents are really terrible, too fruity or too sweet, sometimes both. Where are the good scents like gingerbread and cafe au lait instead of the blue spruce one (ugh) or another with some winter name that smelled terrible?

I treated James to a soup at Panera before we came home. The place was packed since it was just a little after noon, but it was warm enough that we could sit out on the terrace and I was quite content eating my chicken noodle soup with a surfeit of carrots and reading "Just Cross Stitch." Got some photos of beautiful autumn trees, too. The trees that started to turn when we finally got a cold spell are coloring up beautifully!

It would have been a big temptation to sit down again when we got home, but instead I finished up the job I started on Friday: there were still books stacked horizontally on James' bookshelf in the bedroom and everything there was quite dusty. So that was all removed and dusted and sorted, the shelves wiped down, some junk on James' dresser tossed out, and the carpet vacuumed again. I also vacuumed the stuffed animals on the shoe rack on top of the chifforobe; our bedroom really gets dusty despite the fact we spend very little time in it. No idea why.

I also sorted James' and my pills for the week and washed the towels.

We had sausage and cheese tortellini for supper in the last of the Prego no-sugar-added sauce and half a Ritter "Pfefferminz" bar each for dessert. Watched a couple of episodes of M*A*S*H that hadn't come up in the rotation lately, then The Durrells in Corfu (Gerry's nearly disastrous birthday party—noticed last week that Milo Parker, who plays Gerry, is getting a shadow on his upper lip and looked up his age; he's sixteen, but Gerry has just turned thirteen), and Alaska: the Last Frontier.

Labels: animals, books, chores, cleaning, dogs, food, pets, shopping

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:16:00 PM

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