Coffee Chat: November Is Autumn

Hello all.  Do come in.  We've coffee and some of those wonderful German spice cookies sold at Aldi this time of year.  I hit the jackpot that shopping day.  I found the Speckulatias and Salted Caramel creamer without carrageenan and the sole container of salted caramel cream cheese spread.  It was a bonus day.  But do have a seat, have coffee, have cookies and let's talk.

It's not cool outdoors at present.  But it seems silly to have iced tea when you can see how like autumn it appears with all those lovely leaves that have changed color and which are slowly drifting to the ground.  As always November proves itself the true month of autumn in our state and I really should just adjust my mind to that fact and stop thinking it will be cool or pretty until November.  I wish the cool would come along once more!  Still it is quite pretty out there and it's kind of nice to see the green grass contrasting with the trees isn't it?



You know we've not been shopping for groceries really since last month?  I've run into the grocery over the past four weeks to pick up the odd item or so but no real major shopping has gone on.  And honestly I'm finding we've done rather well without it.  I don't expect that this month of course, not with the holidays upon us and my not having a turkey nor sweet potatoes nor...well nearly all of the things that make a holiday meal the holiday meal.  I have the basics of course, meal and flour and sugar and such but not the special things.  I shall be shopping for those this week and possibly the next pay period as well.  As of this moment now, I am out of onions and carrots and cocoa and envelopes.  Envelopes of course haven't a thing to do with holiday meals or even groceries but it is something I need to look to replace as we require them when paying bills.  Whatever I am out of, goes on a list and I then make it a point to find those items wherever I must go to get them.

But yes, no real shopping, no big shopping trip to the grocery in a month's time and somehow this feels right, as though we're starting to get into a different mindset as we near these final couple of years prior to retirement.   And while I don't expect to have us manage without over these two months I'm seriously thinking that come January we really ought to manage just fine on a once a month trip even though the pantry is not fully stocked just yet.

John started November working but it also heralded in his five day off stretch which comes around once a month.  I say we're just fooling ourselves saying he has five days off because the day after a shift is almost always spent sleeping.  It's hard to go 24 hours without much more than an hour's nap and so it must be made up somewhere.  The day after his shift is almost always a very quiet day in our home.  However, this week he had four lovely days off and we got to enjoy one of them fully.   It began with my desire to run errands.  I'd thought we'd run to the banks and then the grocery and then home again and really that is what we did but not quite as I'd planned.  We picked up the mail and took off the loads of trash which included the two large bags from the shed.   Incidentally, I found my bag of pecans I'd started gathering tucked into the side of the trunk of the car, which I found as I went to organize the trunk.  So glad that small bit of nuts had not been thrown away.  Picking up the mail on our way out of the yard revealed a mailbox filled with packages and envelopes.

It was the most fun mail we've picked up in a long while.  Nothing pricey but lots of little things that we'd looked forward to receiving.  I got more of that lovely Remedy Phytoplex moisturizer and a Jamberry order and John had ordered a clip for the car mat in my car.  He'd sucked the previous one up in the vacuum at the car wash.   We also got car chargers for our cell phones because much as we love our new phones with media and apps running on them we are prone to run them down rather quickly.  And holiday catalogs and magazines and not one bill...See how much fun it was to get that mail?

We drove on to the bank.  I'd forgotten it was the 3rd of the month which is always a very busy banking day, but I really wanted to deposit that bit of money into our savings account.  It feels so good to watch that balance slip upwards instead of down!  John opted to take it in the bank.  He does so very little business there that he said he really ought to go in and let them get familiar with his face as well as mine.  Then we drove on to the other bank, where we keep our household account to make a deposit.

Instead of returning to our hometown for the eggs and cheese I'd meant to buy to see us through until shopping this week, he started driving north from that town.  The next town north is some 40 miles away and it goes through lovely farm lands and wooded plots and old beautiful farm houses with huge barns and weathered wood outbuildings.  These farms are the sorts featured in magazines in the 1920s and '30s, such as Progressive Farmer types of modern farms.  They make me ache for another era, which I confess I spend more time than I ought yearning for anyway.  I won't say that I year for the simpler life because it surely wasn't but it does seem to me it was a different sort of life and I long for that difference in my own.   I've always felt as though I somehow missed my proper era of living and maybe that's why I love digging about in the past via genealogy and history.

After we cross the river which borders our county on the north and the east, the land changes and begins to be more hill and dale  with lovely deep curving hillsides and deep sheltered sunny slopes.   It's obvious there's a difference in climate, as well.  Immediately we began to see a good deal more color on the trees than we'd seen here in our immediate area.  Funny how just 20 miles can make so much difference isn't it?

We enjoyed our ride.  We ate out again which is unusual for us.  We shopped.  I was over the moon about finding a Winesap apple available which is increasingly hard to find.  They are a deep burgundy color not the bright red of other apples and they are tart and sweet with a cider-ish sort of taste to them, which is also why they are a favored apple for making ciders.  They remind me of the autumn trips to the mountains my parents used to make.  On our way home, we'd stop somewhere in the mountains near an orchard and buy bags of apples to bring home.  Oh my the aroma that crept through the car as we drove homeward!  Oh the pleasure of eating a just picked apple as a snack as we rode!  It was the better part of those autumn vacations and it is that memory I choose when I am able to find fresh Winesap apples.

John and I chattered and talked and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  This particular grocery chain is well known for their apple fritters and we bought some to bring home for Saturday breakfast.  I'd planned steak as our weekend meal and John, not knowing this, picked up a few Russet potatoes to bake.   I do have a loyalty card at this store and though I didn't have it with me, I mentioned to the clerk at the register that I had one.  She sent the bag boy to the office to look it up and I got my discounts.  And yes, I did remember my eggs and cheese!  It wouldn't have done to have forgotten those.

We came home and sort of fell into our usual pre-Shabat routine of doing last minute jobs and at one point John mentioned that his throat had a burning sensation.  By the time Shabat hour had come around he was sniffling and clearing his throat and sneezing.  Sigh.   Cold or allergy?  I don't really know but he was miserable the rest of the weekend, enough so to skip church on Sunday.  I can't say I was disappointed.  I'd developed a toothache on Saturday and barely slept with the pain all that night, but then it cleared up almost as quickly as it began.  I had a swollen cheek to show for the slight pain I'd suffered.  And so you see why I've really hung on to Friday as a stellar sort of day for this time off spell. The weekend itself proved a bit of a bummer!   John hasn't another block of days like this until after Thanksgiving.  From here on it's the whole crazy schedule of work one day, sleep one day, cram in all he possibly feels he can cram in one day and then rinse and repeat.

Of course, time change came along for us this weekend.  Loathsome old time change!  It's not half so bad this time of year when we fall back to regular time but it does take getting used to.  Since daylight savings time last spring we've often as not had dinner about 1:30p each day and supper around 6p.   Now we shall feel hungry an hour earlier than we've been accustomed to eating.  And my 10:30p bedtime looks more like 9:30p which doesn't suit my husband in the least.  I have appreciated waking to daylight once more and I don't mind so much the early evening darkness.  I think it bothers John less than it used to now that he only ever leaves or returns home in the early morning anyway.  It used to be, when he worked the 12 hours shifts, that he'd leave at dark and return after dark and he just hated it.

I've been reading a good deal more lately than I've read in quite some time.  I'm still slowly working my way through the Grace Livingston Hill books I own.  Last week I read Ariel Custer, which is going to be tossed as the cover is torn off and the pages yellowed badly. This past week I read Marigold which was a nice enough book but definitely not a book I feel compelled  to hang onto.  I liked the description of the clothing this time best, I think.  Mrs. Hill doesn't often go into great details about costumes but in this one she did.  The book opens with Marigold trying to convince her mother that an evening dress she's purchased is the most perfect dress.  Of course, it's got a very low cut back and is shocking in it's crimson accents on white silk.  I pictured the dress something like this one, though we can't see the back of this one:

The details given about the dress are very similar to this with the sash coming down from the top and the 'girdle' belt and the ends of this one do appear to be fringed.

Most shocking of all was the price mentioned for the dress Marigold purchased:  $150!   Mrs. Hill is often a more economical person in her character's budget accounts so you can see how prominently this dress fared in her story.  The dress is mentioned twice more in the book and it's a sort of fun side note to the story to "follow the dress".  She mentions other pieces of clothing as well, namely a brown suit with sable cuffs and collar which sounds just lovely.  I know it's not popular to like real fur but I do and I don't mind saying so. I don't know that I could wear it simply because in the past I had a coat with a rabbit fur collar and all I did was itch, sneeze and sniffle while wearing it.   It was a lovely coat, the nicest I've ever owned, but not a good purchase in the end since it was misery to wear. 

I picked up the book I reviewed for Sunday's post, Nourished by Lia Huber after that.  I didn't expect to like the book as much as I did.  I expect to finish that shortly and then I'll start the next book which  I'd also received in the mail on Friday.  It is an Emilie Loring book I didn't have on the shelf: Here Comes the Sun!   I say I don't have it but you know the last book I bought I said I didn't have either...and it's perfectly true it was not on the shelf.  It was beside my chair waiting to be read!  So I've an extra copy now.  However, I've yet to find this one on the shelf so unless it's out of order, I think it perfectly safe to say that I hadn't a copy until now.  I've set myself the task of reading the Loring books in order of publication date.  

When I set myself a task like these, to read all of the GLH books and sort them into keep or rehome, or reading the Loring books in order of publication, I don't try to read   just the one author.  I'll soon get bored with the fare, much like determining I'll eat nothing but chicken for the next several weeks.  It might not do me any harm but it will certainly make me well and truly tired of chicken!  I break up my reading by taking up other books in between.  I might well read one GLH and one Loring each week but there's usually something else tossed in to the mix to keep those authors from going stale on me.  I've really enjoyed picking up the reading habit once again.  I hadn't realized how much I'd missed it until I took it up on a regular basis again.

I've read a great deal of comments of late about GLH being 'like Emilie Loring' which I don't find at all to be true.   The authors both stuck to a sort of pattern for their characters but I would hardly say they are alike.  Mrs. Hill's female leads often tend to be anxious and nervous and rarely take the lead in their own lives and when they do it's often with a fearful mother who lacks any spunk at all.   Mrs. Loring's female leads almost always are best described as spunky, independent and determined.  Mrs. Hill often includes some villain-ish man (and occasionally a woman) determined to press the lead character into a bad moral situation.  The danger in her books tend to be almost always be moral danger while Mrs. Loring's characters often face physical danger of some sort.  Mrs. Loring's characters tend to become embroiled in a mystery and the antagonist doesn't usually have a romantic interest in the female lead character at all.  

That said, there are similarities.  I absolutely love that both women had a strong sense of home and homemaking and apparently cherished these roles in their own lives as well as in their female lead character's lives.  I don't mind one bit reading of a little economy or thrift in either author's books.  It makes me feel more at home with them both!  Both women obviously liked pretty clothes.  Mrs. Hill doesn't always devote a great many descriptions to the clothing but when she does it's obvious that she liked pretty things as well as Mrs. Loring.  Both women also included descriptions of the rooms their characters inhabited.  I 've pictured easily many a comfortable or drear room as they descried it!Mrs. Hill's books include a good deal of Bible verses and at least one character will make a statement of faith before the end of most of her books, though she did not start her career writing such faith statements into her books.  Mrs. Loring is less prone to do so though her characters always have a strong faith based life.   In truth, I find Mrs. Loring's books a bit more sophisticated but just as morally sound  as Mrs. Hill's. And finally they both seem to choose similar settings and locales.  Pennsylvania, Maine, the seaside, Washington, D.C. are common to them both.

Here of late, thanks to Professor Patti Bender's writings on her blog, I've been looking up fashions, songs, movies, ads, headlines from the year immediately prior to a book's publication date.  It's a fun added dimension to the books and I find it increases my understanding as well as pleasure in a book to 'know' what the author is writing about.  This website has been especially fun to look at fashion examples to go with these 1920s and '30s books.

Are any of you interested in vintage fashions?  I personally am to the point that I pay close attention to the fashion pages in my vintage magazines.  I often get ideas for color combinations from older magazines, as well.  And if ever you want to see how to put together a good basic wardrobe...well vintage magazines are key on that end.  They knew all about 'capsule' wardrobes AGES before the current trend of fewer clothes/ more mileage from them. 

I have followed a few blogs where the ladies dress in only one era of styles.  Truly they often have far more clothes than a woman of the same era might have had, but it's fun to see the clothing they have, how they accessorize with vintage or vintage look items and replicate hairstyles, etc.  Truth told I much admire women who immerse themselves in a time period right down to the clothes they wear. 

Do any of you remember Donna who blogged her 1950's life?  She wore clothes, decorated her home, followed the routine, of a 1950's housewife, etc.  Eventually she gave up that role and moved on to other creative endeavors but hers was meant as an experiment from a sociological standpoint and she ended up embracing many elements of that era.  Perhaps by the time I'm ready to post this I'll have found her old website though I spent far too long looking for it just now.  Anyway, it was very intriguing to me and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Here we go!  I found it under a new name but same blog.  Scroll down the archives to January 2009 and start reading there.  Donna no longer is following the experiment but she stuck with it a good long while.  

I myself am in a betwixt and between sort of role.  I dress and decorate in  a modern way but readily confess to preferring a more old fashioned less hectic, less consumeristic sort of life.  I also prefer doing things the old fashioned way often because it is more economical.  I love vintage magazines and old movies and books from the '20s to '50s, as well.

At the grocery the other day, John asked me if there were any magazines I'd like to get.  I tentatively reached out for one but put it right back on the shelf.  I'm just not quite able to bring myself to pay $16 for a magazine!   If I'm paying that much, I'll choose a nicer copy of a vintage magazine and get years worth of enjoyment from it.   I get very few modern day magazines.  For some reason Better Homes and Gardens arrives these days packaged with Family Circle.   It's very telling that I spent time looking through Family Circle and though I'd been reading Better Homes and Gardens and got quite confused when the BH&G issue proved to be the second magazine and not the first in my reading.  I must have put the magazine down three or four times to look at the Family Circle and reassure myself I was reading BH&G.

I have a few issues of BH&G from the 1920s and early 1930s but I enjoy most the 1938 issue I received not too long ago.  I'm going to look for more of those later 1930's issues of that magazine.  Every now and then I find a span of years that just feels familiar and right to me in magazines.  I'm not at all crazy about any Woman's Day from 1959 but I do like Good Housekeeping from that year and the early part of the 1960's.  Same for Family Circle. I don't care for the issues from the early 1930's to late 1940's but I like the latter 1950's issues very well.   At times I'm a little embarrassed by my large collection of vintage magazines but I do enjoy them over and over again and I am slowly weeding out the rattiest ones though it does pain me to 'lose' an issue.  I have three of this month's that I shall have to release.  I don't have so very many November issues.

I really ought to be ruthless with them.  Just let go of every single one that is slightly mouse eaten (from having been stored in a basement or attic long before I came across them) or which are missing pages, or in which the pages are so brittle that clearing up behind them after reading is a real task.  And better organize them so I know what I have for each month.  Sigh.  I was just sitting here earlier today thinking I'd no major jobs for this week but I think I just found myself one!

Well dears, the coffee pot is empty and the afternoon moving on rather rapidly.  I have to prepare John's work lunch for tomorrow and see what there might be for our supper tonight as well, so off I go and off you go.   Talk to you again very soon!