autumn musings

Well, I hope everyone had a good Halloween/Samhain/Disingnights/weekend :)
(just wait, soon enough it'll be Chrismahannakwanzayuleka :P)

I had a good weekend, overall. Saturday was spent mostly in my pjs making chocolate-chocolate chip cookies (check the recipe from Joyofbaking.com, I've had great success with it) before dressing up in my Ren-faire duds and heading out with boy and friends for the evening. I'll have to post a pic of the corset later... yes, I did make my own corset for the Faire ^^ But that's another post in the making.
As the evening went on, they decided I had to see Shaun of the Dead as I hadn't before. Generally I'm a total wuss when it comes to horror movies, but this was just funny. Life tends to be funny when your rum and Coke is in a coffee cup and since the Coke is flat, it looks just like coffee...

Overall, we had a good time. The next day I packed all my crap up (I had lots of stuff to haul, being car-less) and waited for my ride to our Samhain celebration with my Proto-Grove (a Druid group... mostly), which was less a serious reminiscing of our dead ancestors than one of our normally solitary witchy members having a go at leading for the first time. She did just fine :) and the potluck afterward was awesome as usual. It had been years since I'd had Hamburger Helper, and yet it was still delicious. Funny how some things don't change no matter how much you do... There was also roast chicken, squash, very good chili and my cookies! So I returned home to lounge on the bed in a food coma while feeling bad that we weren't at my place/leaving the cat alone for another night. But I guess he was okay... though he did run out of water, so that was top priority when I got home this morning. Very glad I got an early bus and had time to spend with Genki before class and work today; I still feel the poor kid is alone too much.
I know it seems weird to say that of a cat, but as my boyfriend pointed out in the first place, he's really more like a dog. (He still thinks he's alpha no matter what... but other than that, he does crave attention in a very doggy manner.) Hopefully the new laser-pointer my friend got me will help us remember to play with him more often; that cat lives up to his name. (Genki is Japanese for healthy, energetic, get-up-and-go attitude, etc. We're thinking of adding "spaz" to the list of acceptable translations.)

So now it's a new year (according to old Celtic ways of thinking) and I've been pondering that. As a kid, I knew about the Jan. 1 new year, and the Chinese new year sometime in February (as it's based on the lunar calander so the date changes every year)... I've never really thought about a new year starting in the autumn. Granted, I have an autumn birthday, so to me it seems that from Halloween on it's time to party :)
And when autumn does roll around, I feel like it's "my" time. It's probably just my ginormous ego, but I feel like the leaves are changing, it's getting chilly, now's the time to curl up on a sofa with cocoa and stew and feel satisfied with things. I was born this time of year, so it's my time to start anew. I'm not much for spring--all the mud and rushing around and cold rain doesn't suit me. Summer is hot, though it's nice that everything's finally green, and late summer I love especially--the world is golden, it's hot but not muggy, the bugs are winding down and the sun is at her peak. I finally feel like I can settle down into my work and get things done (including school, I always seem to do better fall semester than spring--by the time it's spring semester, I feel like winter break shouldn't be over and I have all kinds of trouble focusing on schoolwork).
How's autumn for you?