the season approaches....

 I commented on Twitter the other day that this year, I'm gonna go all in (well, as all in as I ever go) on Hallowe'en decorating this year. It's been almost 3 years of a pandemic and other nastiness, I finally got the fixes done on my house, I'm ready for something silly and enjoyable. 

I already have some lights - a short string of spider-shaped lights and a longer one of color-changing LED lights in orange and purple. I'll get those out in a couple weeks along with the little glitter-covered spiders and bat. And I have a few little toys with a Halloween theme, including the duck-decoy skeleton. 

But today - I "had" to go to Sherman - the kind of chocolate chips (the 60% cacao dark chocolate Ghirardelli) I use in my oatmeal were getting low, and Wal-mart here no longer carries them. Come winter, I could mail order them, but right now it's too iffy that we might get a few more really hot days that would make them into a melted glob en route. And there were a few other things that Target has that I can't get locally.

While on the way there, I decided: well, I'm making the trek, might as well get refills of a couple of the cosmetics I use at the Ulta rather than having to mail order them. And then I could just duck into the JoAnn Fabrics for a moment - not to buy very much, but to look around. 

I did pick up the most recent "Simply Knitting" and a couple balls of orange-variegated Sugar and Cream (I need more dishcloths). And then I saw a black lace "curtain panel" - they displayed it over the top of a long curtain in a window, but I realized - hey, if I got that, and a tension rod, I could hang it in the back doorway of my kitchen. I had thought the other day "Maybe I consider getting one of those "hippie" beaded curtains to hang there?" (and I still might, just not right now) but I realized I could hang this up.

So I bought it. 

And when I got home*, I put it up:

)

First photo is looking out from inside the kitchen (that's my bedroom door and the linen closet next to it) and the second is looking into the kitchen.

I really like the way it looks. It makes me happy and when I put it up I experienced a feeling of delight I hadn't felt for a while. (Maybe I figure out something for Christmastime/winter - I wonder if they make these in white with snowflakes). 

It's easy to push aside to go through the doorway (you can see I set my "pantry" up on either side of the door), but it does add something kind of fun. (I will take it down tomorrow morning and wait until September to put it back up - the guy is supposed to come to collect the check tomorrow)

Also, at the Ulta, I got this:

I know some people mock Pumpkin Spice as "basic." But you know? "Basic" is only a couple letters away from "based," which now has the slang connotation of being yourself and not caring what other people think of you (it's usually presented as the opposite of "cringe"). 

It did help remove some of the remaining burnt-vinegar smell: I had had a microwave-oven cleaning thing that I put in (you fill it with vinegar) and set it for the full time BUT my oven is apparently more powerful than the one it was designed for and the plastic MELTED and some of the vinegar burned (and it set off my smoke alarm.) The house smelled really bad - I opened windows but could still smell it today. 

(*Getting back home was terrible. There's construction on northbound 69/75 and they have the right lane closed, but they DON'T TELL YOU THAT IT IS until right before you're supposed to merge, so unless you take that route every day (I had not been down to Sherman for almost a month). It took me about twice as long to get home, so I'm going to wait a while before going back there - there's no way to avoid the bad section by exiting earlier or anything, it was backed up to over the bridge over the river).