If you happened to walk by my house last night, just before 6 o’clock, you would have seen my three favorite people in their finest Halloween attire. The tallest one celebrated a birthday the day before, complete with an impromptu birthday parade in my living room. Maddie played the recorder while Oliver sang Happy Birthday and threw confetti.

For some reason – and I’m not questioning it – the kids picked up each little bit of paper off the floor, on their own, with no nagging from me. It was thrilling to watch.

And so it is November. Creepy halloween decorations – ghosts made of white sheets, plastic skeletons, and fake zombie hands rising from the grass – still adorn the neighborhood lawns today, but they won’t survive the weekend. The weather is supposed to cool off again starting tomorrow. Men will soon be sporting mustaches for a good cause, and  aspiring authors are into their first day of NaNoWriMo. Briefly, I even considered joining in on the blogging version, NaBloPoMo, but I’m pretty sure a good 75% of you would unsubscribe after day five of me posting daily. I would be sad if you left.

I’ve been thinking about making some changes around here, and November may be the time to get things started. Or maybe I’ve already started these changes and am only just now realizing it and accepting it.

I’m planning to use this space to write more about personal things, issues for which there may not be a relevant recipe. Yes, yes, I know. I’ve already been pretty darn personal here in this space. So maybe that’s not the big change. What’s changing is that, sometimes, there may not be a recipe.

I’ve always felt this obligation to share a recipe along with each post, but what I find is that this pressure to post a recipe means I don’t always write some of the topics that I really want to write about.

I’ve gone through so much with my father these last eight months, from dealing with his worsening dementia to coping with the suboptimal care in his nursing home. I’ve wanted to write about some of these things – or write more about them – but what dessert pairs well with despair? What type of cake conveys the proper anguish of realizing you’ve lost your father?

Sometimes, life just isn’t about the food.

With that pressure to post recipes all the time off my back, I plan to write here more. It’s good for me, and I haven’t done enough of it over these last months.

Maybe I’ll even consider a modified NaBloPoMo, just to get me writing more. Because the writing? It is a very good thing.

Whew. I already feel better.

In October 2011, Sam and I were all set to take a trip to New York City over the weekend between our birthdays. About one week before we were to leave, my father fell and ended up being hospitalized. It was a complicated hospitalization, and one of a series of events that led to his rapid health decline. Needless to say, we cancelled that trip.

One year later, in 2012, we planned a make-up trip on a similar weekend in October. The goal this time was to celebrate my 40th birthday in the city, to really do it up. We bought tickets for a Broadway show, scored dinner reservations at Eleven Madison Park, and had dinners with good friends planned. And, just as the year before, another health issue  – my husband’s this time – prompted us to cancel the trip about a week before we were to leave.

I decided to try one last time. I booked airline tickets and made a hotel reservation. We would spend this year’s birthday – my 41st – in New York City. And if something happened to intervene, I knew that we would give up on ever trying to plan an October trip again, especially to New York.

The day before we were to leave, my son fell head first – face first, really – into the corner of the coffee table. His screams were awful to hear. I was certain that he’d fractured his skull. Once he calmed down, he seemed relatively okay, despite the immediate swelling around his nose and upper lip. We took him to the emergency room just in case. And selfishly, I thought, This is it. This is the event that will cause us to miss New York.

Because he is one lucky kid, though, he escaped without any broken bones or lost teeth. And because we are the luckiest of parents, we were able to leave Oliver and his sister with their Grammy for a glorious long weekend in Manhattan.

And this trip? It was a total splurge. Every bit of it.

(If you’re interested, I’ve listed the places we visited during the trip at the bottom of the post.)

I woke this morning to the tinkling of a jingle bell, the sound of a cat toy being batted around. It was still dark out, well before 6 am, and I had no interest in getting up yet. The tinkling was coming from our bedroom door, then from near my side of the bed, then from across the room. I rolled over and covered my head with the pillow, remembering the reason for the jingle bell.

It was Louie.

Louie is the cat we adopted last  summer as a kitten. He, his litter mates, and their mother were victims of the flooding that happened in northern Florida last June after Tropical Storm Debby. The kids and I saw Louie at a cat adoption event held at a local pet store, and after cuddling with him in the store, we knew he was destined to join our family.