Just as you can tell the beginning of the Christmas season when Starbucks brings out the red cups, you can tell that autumn has hit when places the the Barnes and Noble Cafe start serving pumpkin cheesecake. This weekend, we toasted the beginning of fall by spending an hour at the local B&N on the way back from dinner, where I purchased a collection of Halloween cards (coming soon to some of YOUR mailboxes), and a birthday card for a friend in England. (Her birthday’s actually TODAY, October 3rd, but for some reason I thought it was the nineteenth. I blame the move. I figure this is a good excuse for anything I mess up between now and Thanksgiving.)

I also bought the latest Anita Blake novel by Laurell K. Hamilton, Incubus Dreams, which I’d managed to forget was coming out at all. Yay for surprises! Yay for Fuzzy spotting it, after I’d gone from the restroom directly to the card section with the intention of buying cards and a magazine.

But that was actually the END of the weekend.

The beginning, Rana’s opening, I already mentioned. Afterwards, we went out for dinner at Charleston’s, where the ambiance (dim flickering lights, cozy intimate booths, great prime rib) was perfect for a stormy autumn evening.

Saturday, I woke early, wired from meeting new people, and from a series of extremly disturbing dreams, involving Asian vampires, office stairwells, and bad disco music. And I mean really early. Like, 5 AM early. So I puttered on the web, IM’d with a friend who lives in a different part of TX, and then went back to bed for a couple of hours. When we were both awake and functioning, we headed out in search of breakfast, despite the fact that it was nearly 4 in the afternoon at that point.

Even though we knew they were a kitschy chain, we wound up at Cracker Barrel because we like new things, and we ALSO knew they served breakfast all day, which we had. Their sausage was a little salty for me, but the coffee was fresh, and decently strong (for restaurant coffee), and the staff was really friendly, and we had fun with the peg board game (there’s one at every table). After we ate, while Fuzzy was in the restroom, I wandered around the country store portion of the establishment, picking up a wrought iron tree that holds ten jack’o’lantern-shaped votive holders for $20. (I resisted the urge to buy the pumpkin tea set. I wish I hadn’t.)

We then wandered in and out of The RoomStore and Rooms to Go‘s outlet store, not so much buying, as pricing certain things we need to get (a new entertainment center, guest room furniture, a china hutch) for the house at some point.
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