A fine bright day.

It's a beautiful day outside! It started off chilly, cool enough to really make wearing my new autumn coat feel really good, but it's warmed up a bit to a more comfortable temperature. But underneath the warmth, there's still that bite of autumn's chill on the breeze. It makes me feel refreshed, and makes me want to get in the kitchen and cook all sorts of delicious things.

Which is exactly why I went out and bought another bag of beans today, and a ham steak. I wanted to get bacon, but the store only had Ready Crisp bacon, and that wouldn't work very well with the beans, so I settled on the ham. It was a good price, and will add some tasty flavour to tomorrow's bean supper.

I love that Rei likes the beans that I make. They're incredibly cheap ($1.28 per pound of white navy beans), filling, and tasty. A pot of them costs less than $5 to make (including the tomato soup and the meat that I usually add), and will usually do us both for two meals. When money's tight, it's hard to get much better than that.

I expect we'll be eating a lot of beans this winter, too. The heating vents in the apartment don't actually go into the kitchen, so if we want to keep that part of the house even tolerably warm, the oven has to be on for a long time. No better way to accomplish that than by making baked beans, unless, of course, I'm also baking bread!

Or baking anything, really, but I do need to get more practice with my bread recipes, so this winter will be a great chance. Helps to warm the apartment and keep us fed!

I've been feeling the urge to do some embroidery again lately. I've got a half-finished cross-stitch butterfly pattern that I need to find and get back to, since it'll be a Christmas present for Rei's aunt this year, but until I can be arsed to find it, I'll work on a needlepoint kit that my mother got me ages ago but I have yet to do more than just look at. I haven't done needlepoint before, but it looks simple enough, and I can't imagine I'll have too many problems with it. My only complaint is that I don't like the stiff canvas that it's done on. I much prefer the pliability of Aida cloth or evenweave fabric rather than something that feels all plasticky without being actual stiff plastic canvas. I'm one of those people for whom textures can make or break a thing.

But I'll try to get used to it, since I like the pattern and want to actually complete it some day.

I'm thinking of doing some cross-stitch Christmas/Yule cards this year, too. I like making my own cards, and doing so can keep me amused for hours. Drawing, painting, stitching, you name it. I haven't made too many, mostly owing to the fact that I keep forgetting about such things until it's too late, but maybe this year I'll try to get a head start on them. Even if I only make a few embroidered cards and paint the rest, that'll be something.

That's another thing that fall weather does to me! It gives me a great burst of creativity!