And there's a mouse under my bed.

Clearly you need a cat. Then there would be a dead mouse on your pillow!

Lots of healing ~ma for Darcy. Poor doggie. People stink sometimes.

Cass, your niecelet is very luck to have someone like you, to whom she can run.

Jars, Sox and I have fathers who are brothers and yet I suspect we both culturally identify more with our mothers -- mine is all Yankee and hers is distinctly Southern. I certainly think of her as having a Southern sensibility that is totally foreign to me, and I'd bet she sees a certain stoicism in me and my sisters that she'd assign to my mother's influence. One wonders what we'd be like had we been boys, because our fathers probably would have been much more interested.

IOW, it's a damn big country and our disunity is all we have to unify us.

Now I much check on Aimee's pictures...

The pictures are awesome.

I would love a cat. Not really a dead mouse, but a cat. However, I'd then be much more sick than I am. Stupid allergies. I want a Lifestyle Pet, but I don't want to pay $6000 and wait 18 months for it.

I'm a bit worried I won't be able to find a pumpkin at Thanksgiving, as they're really only a Halloween thing over here. Maybe I can make a squash pie and just lie aout it...

Go for it! Almost nobody in the States has real pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving anyway since the canned "pumpkin" that almost everyone uses is actually a similar (but cheaper) orange squash whose name eludes me at the moment. (It's not butternut, I don't think - IIRC it's a variety whose sole purpose is to be canned as pumpkin for Thanksgiving.)

Cultural identity as a Yankee story: my grandparents spent most of their adult lives in Boston and currently live in New Hampshire, but my grandmother's family originally comes from Tennessee. As part of their annual book-buying tour of the East Coast (they're antiquarian book dealers), they always meet up with a group of women booksellers in Atlanta who my grandmother has become friendly with, to buy books and chat and such. On one occasion I don't know what the topic was, but one of them made a comment along the lines of "You're such a nice person/have such good manners, you know, for a Yankee." And my grandmother (who does have very good manners) said, well you know my mother's family is from Tennessee. At which one of the women in the group looked pointedly at one of the others and said "I told you so."

DH and I do identify as Jewish even as atheists who haven't set foot in a synagogue since my brother's bar mitzvah. It wasn't something we gave much thought to until we had the baby, but as soon as we found out I was pregnant we both realised we did want Dylan to be raised as a Jew, whatever that turns out to mean.

People from outside the South often don't realize how much the Civil War shaped the psyche of the South. In the South, as Faulkner knew, "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past." Think Ireland after Cromwell, Jars. My mother is a "hell, no, I ain't forgettiing" Southerner in the more genteel sense. The South after the war was dirt poor and the evils of Reconstruction didn't help. Southerners, therefore, kept hating Yankees long after the North had forgotten all about the war. (For the record, I think the Confederacy was wrong, wrong and wrong.)

vw! No ER!

I hope Darcy is going to be okay.

Sorry about the girl, Gris. It's her loss.

In Ireland, this used to be the stereotype for Protestants. Why does everywhere have a group they stereotype like this, I wonder?

A fair portion of those Protestants ended up as those Yankees.

Gris (& Big Duluth too) - points waaaay up to Bonny's thread:

::gives Sox an affectionate squeeze about the shoulders::...

eta: we cooked pumpkin last night - cream of pumpkin soup; pumpkin seeds (regular and old bay)

...and claps with pumpkin glee!

I made a truly nummy pumpkin-ginger soup last night with the castoffs from my lovely jackolantern (pics soon, I hope) and toasted the seeds with spices.

My favorite part if, of this part of the season!

My hair is long and unruly: [link] (that's me with Barb Ferrer [fashionista_35 on LJ], for those of you who know her).

I am getting a significant amount cut after work today. I know more or less the length I want (jaw-length); I just don't know exactly what *style.* I can't have it all one length, because that looks like ASS on me.

Any ideas?

I broke the thread with my neediness.

Okay, but if I get a bad haircut, it's all y'alls' fault.

Teppy, I don't think I've ever seen you look like ASS. It is unpossible.

I like the length it was when you were in SF recently. I know it was a bit longer than your usual, but I thought it looked good.