Starting the Weekend Early

I felt somewhat "off" all day yesterday, for reasons I'm not entirely sure of, but it looks like today will be better. For one thing, I got up at a slightly more reasonable time without having had realistic nightmares, and then my e-mail has been working. The main thing I need to do today is read, and it's a lovely, if chilly, day today -- one of my two favorite kinds of fall weather. It's what you might call "crisp" -- so I think I'll take another long walk and then sit in the woods to read. I've got Black Forest ham, good crusty bread and a few treats. I've been trying to de-spice my Thermos to carry ordinary tea. I thought the lingering spice scent might have come from the chai I took last week, but then I remembered that this was the Thermos I took to cold weather football games when I was in high school, which means it carried a lot of spicy tea.

It wasn't real spiced tea, though. I hadn't started learning about tea or drinking it (other than iced) at the time, but one of the popular "gifts from the kitchen" in those days was this spiced tea mix that involved lemon-flavored instant tea, Tang, cinnamon and cloves. You mixed a couple of spoons of this mix with hot water for hot, spicy tea. It was very popular as a teacher gift, presented in jars or tins, which is why we had a lot of it. It sounds hideous to me now (instant tea! Ew!), but I recall liking it quite a lot, and it made for a good warm drink while sitting in the stands during a football game. And now my Thermos smells like that stuff. It seems to have permeated the plastic. But it's been soaking with baking soda all week, and I think any traces of spice smell are all in my mind. If not, I guess I'll resign myself to bringing spicy teas on my walks.

I had this whole deep analysis of the fairy-tale themed shows currently on TV planned, but I suspect it would have gone epic, and I'm not really in the mood to do it justice now. That's the kind of thing I have to write the night before, and last night I was at dance class. Maybe I'll put it together over the Thanksgiving holiday to have to post some day in December, when I hope I'll be busy with income-producing work.

So, instead, I'm going to head off on my afternoon walk/reading time, then tonight it's a good TV night, and then a weekend of chick flicks.