I found several Georgette Heyer books at the thrift store, and remembering Practical Conservative's love of the author bought them. Not my usual genre, so we'll see.
My life this fall has been apples, election, and hospital. An acquaintance with a backyard orchard had a bumper crop this year, and we easily picked thirty bags' worth. I learned how to make apple butter, and that is what I'm doing with most of them now. It turns out to not be so easy to dispose of quantities of apple scraps in the city when you are stubbornly refusing to order and use the organics bin that you are being forced to pay for.
The hospital was for my oldest child, who is doing well despite taking a Grand Tour of the medical system across seven different sites this month, for a congenital issue that suddenly became a problem. There is some lingering non-obvious aftermath, but she is chugging through most of the functional tests faster than I would.
A neighbor gave me an old table leaf that is more or less the right size for our round living room table, and I put two coats of polyurethane on it. I plan to have Thanksgiving dinner in the living room again; the house has no dining room and it is much more memorable than crowding into the kitchen as usual. The next challenge is the table base: it is a pedestal base--for an oak top that can be six feet long. Someone in the past tried to reinforce the weak point by pounding in a lot of nails. I think I can repurpose the frame of my old homemade dinner table, if I shorten the legs. The hard part will be getting it into place around the pedestal and up under the table top's rails, but it shouldn't be too bad because the frame's legs are attached with removable pegs.