The end of October. What a month this was.

U2's new album is released today. It's called All That You Can't Leave Behind. I ordered it from Amazon, although I haven't heard any songs from it yet. I can't wait to get it and listen.

Tonight is trick or treating. We bought candy to give out for the first time in years. I am hoping the ghouls and goblins will make a dent in Marty's 3-pound bag of Smarties.

Girlhero is cool. I am in love with this simple navigation and easy layout, and her content is even better. It makes me want to make a new web site. Her Buffy blog is great, too. Damn, now I'm really depressed.

Didn't help that the Yankees won the World Series, either. Andy Pettitte did a fine job ("Pet it, Andy") but still . . . I was pulling for the Mets. Hope I pick better for the presidential election.

Oh, lord, I saw a funny quote from GWB: "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." Uh, yeah.

As if that wasn't enough, I thought of another reason why I need to vote for Gore: I love the internet. Hee hee.

Andy Pettitte pitches tonight for the New York Yankees. (You'll need to subscribe to the NYT online to read the story, but the subscription is free.) I have mixed feelings. I love Andy Pettitte but I want the Mets to win.

For those who don't follow America's Pastime (aka Baseball), the New York Mets and the New York Yankees are playing each other in the World Series (baseball's big championship). If the Yankees win tonight, they win it all. If the Mets can win tonight and the next two games, they win it all. The deck is stacked against the Mets, but I'll say it again, I hope they win.

Historically, the Yankees are one of the most interesting teams in baseball. Some of the most colorful and well-loved players were Yankees -- Babe Ruth, Lou Gherig, Mickey Mantle. As a team, they have dominated the sport, and that continues to this day. I can't help but be in awe of them.

But I'm rooting for the Mets for a lot of reasons. I like the National League teams, and the Mets are in the National League. I root for the underdogs, and the Mets are definitely the underdogs. And besides, the Yankees just win too damn much. So that's why I want the Mets to win.

Anyway, I'll be watching tonight. I love Andy Pettitte, but I want the Mets to win.

I Wasn't Built to Get Up at this Time is a cool journal by an English boy. I found it through Rebekah's links.

Speaking of Bek, she is about to head out to Mozambique with the Peace Corps. She's planning to keep a Weblog when she has access to the internet.

I forgot to mention that the new Wallflowers CD, Breach, was produced partly by Michael Penn! Cool!

Thanks to a most thoughtful friend, I have some excellent new music: Paul Simon, You're the One; Mark Knopfler, Sailing to Philadelphia; and The Wallflowers, Breach. All three CDs were just released in the last couple of weeks. And all of them are really, really good.

The Paul Simon CD is a lot different from Rhythm of the Saints and Graceland, his last two big hits. I love both of those albums and I think they both showed the versatility of his talent. But to me, those two albums are showy in a way that Paul Simon's earlier solo work is not. They were more about creating pop with diverse musical styles, South African on Graceland and South American on Rhythm, than they were about the lyrics.

This new album seems to focus on lyrics the way his albums used to, back around the time of Paul Simon, One Trick Pony, and Rhymin' Simon, and the music is more laid back than the last two while still drawing on all kinds of backgrounds. As well as Latin and African sounds, I noticed strains of Indian and Celtic music, but the world music never takes center stage the way it did on Graceland and Rhythm. And the lyrics are just great. (I am not familiar with Songs from The Capeman, so I can't compare it to that.)

More comments to come on the new music. Thank you, Maria. :-)

I thought I loved typefaces. Lines & Splines is a weblog by a guy who is a real font fiend.

In the last few weeks we have been working a lot on the house. We're trying to clear out the extra furniture, hang up the pictures, and finish unpacking the boxes in the corners. This weekend we're actually seeing some progress. I thought I'd post some pictures of the living room and family room.

Living Room. This is the room we painted earlier this year. Here are some chairs we brought back from Georgia last month. Moving around the room to the left, you get another view of the chairs. In this picture you can see the couch and part of the bookcases Marty built. Also, you can see our pile of boxes in the corner, still waiting to be unpacked. And finally, here's another picture of the couch and bookcases. The framed picture on the wall is a chalk drawing done by Marty's Aunt America (actually, more like a great great aunt).

Family Room. This is what you see as you walk into the room. The pictures on the wall are by the same artist as the ones on the wall behind the chairs in the living room. Turning to the right, you see the couch and the coffee table. And the CDs. Across from the couch are the TV and stereo. This is the part of the room we haven't completely figured out yet. We need something, a piece of furniture or something, for our electronics. As Marty says, our current setup looks like a dorm room. :-)

Bonus picture: here's the kitchen with the armoire moved in and a little table instead of the bigger one that used to be in there. This is working out well. Notice the light fixture resting on top of the armoire. We'll be taking that down before long. (And do I really need to mention the post lamp? No, I don't.)

Driving the Mohawk Trail is a collection of photos Marty and I took on Friday when we went driving up in Massachusetts to check out fall foliage.

I've been doing a lot of cooking this weekend. Last night I made meat loaf and today I'm making Chicken Corn Chowder. Mmmmm.

Well, call me lowbrow, but I watched Voyager and South Park tonight instead of the presidential debate. Hey, I watched the first debate all the way through! And yeah, it was pretty unbearable. Tonight we got enough of the action in Wake Forest from flipping the channels during the commercial breaks from the other shows. I heard Al Gore making some self-effacing jokes about not wanting to break in on the conversation, and George W. Bush sounding off about "nation-building" in a way that left no doubt in my mind about his grasp of foreign policy. Sheesh.

I'm not shy about who I'm gonna vote for. Gore pretty much summed it up for me in the first debate when he said, "I support a woman's right to chose, and my opponent does not." Yep, that's kinda how I see it too.

Do you know Slow Wave? It's one of my favorite comics. Jesse Reklaw draws a comic strip of dreams submitted by readers. A few of my favorites:

Psychic Cat
Evil Racoon Hand
The People's Kitty
Cartoon Hunting
The Men in Chicago
Cats Can Fly

Sorry about all the cat toons. Sometimes I just can't help myself.

I saw in the news that today is World Mental Health Day. Three years ago on this day, in October 1997, I went to a free depression screening in State College, Pennsylvania, and discovered that I was depressed. Surprise!

Actually, it wasn't much of a surprise, to me or to anyone else who knew me. I had a lot on my mind. I'd decided that month to quit grad school, and I was scared about moving to Connecticut in December. I had been living alone for a year since Marty had started working in New England, and that had taken a toll on my state of mind as well as our relationship. It had been a hard year, although it certainly had its share of good things too. I was enjoying my job for the first time in quite awhile. Quitting school was scary but also such a relief. And I had found some good friends who really helped me get through it all, like Maria and Kathryn. Thank goodness for them, and for Marty, and for all my other old friends who helped too.

Going to that depression screening was the beginning of a lot of positive changes for me. I started therapy, even though I was leaving for Connecticut in just a couple of months. Talking things out helped me get ready for the move (moving is very stressful for me). I still had a long way to go, after that move, and I was depressed for quite awhile, but getting started was the hardest part. I had been depressed for so many years that I guess I had thought there wasn't any point in trying to get help. Grad school can do that to you.

It's actually hard now to believe that was only three years ago. Three years don't seem like a very long time in the big scheme of things, and yet it feels like my life has changed in so many important ways. Don't misunderstand -- I still feel like the same person, mostly, and the impulses that led me deeper and deeper into depression are still a part of my emotional repertoire. I still have the feelings of inadequacy and emptiness sometimes, but they are usually not as all-consuming as they once were. Overall I am much more confident in myself and my decisions than I was back then. There have been a lot of other changes in the way I feel about myself and my own worth. And my relationships are mostly different from back then too, in a lot of important and positive ways.

The bottom line is, I'm a lot happier than I was then, and I think one of the big reasons is that now I try hard to be responsible for my own happiness rather than only looking for it to come from someone else. And now I'm also setting goals that I really, really want (not like that PhD) and working to find the motivation and the will power to make them happen. That's a big difference in how I live my life.

But going to that depression screening three years ago was the beginning of most of these changes. I am glad to know that there are other people who will get help today. Life is too precious to spend it feeling so bad.

Interesting Salon article on what some artists think about Napster.

United House Wrecking in Stamford is a great place to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon. We were there yesterday and enjoyed walking through the warehouse-sized showrooms looking at all the furniture and reproductions. We bought a set of fireplace tools.

We had a great visit this weekend with my mom and her friend, Faye. The weather turned out to be sunny and crisp instead of cold and rainy, so we got lucky. They left early this morning to drive back to the airport in Hartford.

There's ice on the windshield this morning, for the first time this fall.

Big black boots, curly brown hair, blue eyes, attitude, and that voice . . . The Wallflowers have a new song and album out and I am psyched! I just saw the Sleepwalker video on VH1 and I love it! Jakob Dylan is such the man. :-) And I love his goofball phony Kung-Fu moves too. Whee!

Last night felt like Christmas Eve. My mom and her friend Faye were arriving in the middle of the night, like Santa Claus. I spent the evening getting the house ready, making the beds, doing laundry, straightening up. Then I went to bed around 10:30, keeping an ear open for the doorbell. It was that jumpy kind of sleep that usually happens for me only on Christmas Eve. Anyway, at 2 AM I heard a knock on the front door and went down to open up.

It's great to have my mom here. She's never visited our house before. We looked all over it last night before they went to bed. I finally had to get back to bed so I would at least get some sleep before morning. It was hard to leave for work today, but she'll be there when I get home this afternoon.

Today it looks like rain . . . and indeed, the weather forecast predicts 5 days of cold rain starting today. As if we didn't have enough rain this summer.

As for the wet summer, it seems to have made for a very colorful fall. The trees along the highways are slowly starting to turn, and some of them are already gorgeous. I saw a maple this morning on which the tips of the branches were turning red and the rest of the leaves were still green. The one tree that doesn't seem to be doing that great is the one in our front yard. Last autumn we got a gorgeous display of gold and orange, but this year it seems to be skipping right to mustard brown. Oh well.

Just in time for the cold wet weekend, my mom is coming for a visit. She's arriving tonight on a late flight into Hartford. This will be the first time she's seen our house! Yay!

Oh, MAN. I knew I should've taken my digital camera to work today. I looked at it sitting on the breakfast table and thought, "Hmmmm." But I left it at home. Then, when I went out at lunchtime I stopped by the grocery store, and the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile was parked in the parking lot. Damn!

I love the Wienermobile. I get so tickled when I see it driving down the interstate, which has happened just 3 or 4 times. Today I got to go up and look at it close up. It's soooooo cute. If a 27-foot long wiener can be "cute." :-)