Tonight's entry will serve as a way to avoid the pumpkin that is currently sitting on my kitchen table awaiting not carving, but processing. It's pumpkin butter time and as much as I really, really want the output that actually doing the work will bring I am having trouble getting to it. It's been that kind of week.

Tonight Brainiac - who is having motivation problems of his own - and I attempted to reboot by heading out to dinner without the kids. We needed some thinking time and space to evaluate some of the crossroads (not enough to have a single crossroad - no, we seem to collect them) at which we find ourselves. In the words of Ferris Bueller, life moves pretty fast and we were having trouble finding time to sit down and hash stuff out. Nothing bad or icky but important nonetheless. I feel better for having sat across a quiet table and shared our thoughts on the subject. Of course, the duck potstickers and chevre gnocchi didn't hurt.

This week I finally opened a jar of this summer's dilly beans. Quite nice, as always. That dilly recipe is so dependable that it's kind of reassuring. How many things in life always come out pretty much as we expect, just about every time? Not at all a bad thing when staring down one or two of the aforementioned crossroads.