flannel and pumpkin

I mentioned at the end of the summer that I stole Rachael's flannel sheets after she left. I put them on this week and they are a little too inviting. I got home yesterday at about 6pm after a day of meeting people downtown, some shopping, and a trip to check out the clean up job at my new apartment (more on that later). It was actually a pretty warm afternoon, but after I got home and got still with a good book, the room got colder and I got under the sheets to warm up before I got around to finishing scoring some tests. Well, getting under the covers with a good book turned into a short nap and then I wasn't good for much for the rest of the night, although I did get some dishes done and made a little progress on the tests.

Today, being Sunday and all, I have less ambitions for getting stuff done, but still the coolness of my room (the boiler, we hear, has been fired up, but isn't producing much heat yet after a summer of rest) is keeping me under the covers listening to podcasts or finishing up this book instead of studying language at the table. I did decide, with one chapter left in the book, that I should save that for bedtime and put on another layer to post a blog and make a birthday card for someone in the office.

I bought my first nan gua (pumpkin, or squash) this week and boiled it today to make a pumpkin mush for use in pumpkin bread later on this week or next. That's a new fall/winter tradition I started last year. When the weather gets cold, it's time for some pumpkin bread!

Oh yeah, about the apartment. I had it painted on Wednesday. The guy brought nothing to cover anything. I was glad I left the cover on the couch and hadn't brought anything important to the apartment yet. He left the biggest mess I had ever seen on the floor. Cigarette butts, chopsticks from his ordered in lunch, paint in puddles on the floor. I got a student to help me call and complain to the store and they came in a group to clean it up the next night. I stayed to help and supervise, but they assured me that they would do it themselves. I went to check on it yesterday. They made progress by scraping the paint off the floor and off most of the furniture (furniture that comes with the apartment), but still left a lot to be done with paint left unscraped behind doors and in thin layers on the floor where they had cleaned it then wiped it and walked through and tracked it through the apartment again. I am not angry, but just frustrated. I think it'll just be easier to do it myself this time.