Beauty All Around Us, in Colors

I've got what looks like our first pumpkin growing out back on that aggressive vine of ours. That's exciting! I'm home alone on this Friday night, with plenty on my mind:

(1) watching the Giants on TV (great game!),
(2) thinking about my son at his planning meeting with friends going to Burning Man,
(3) thinking about a friend who loves baseball and is watching her hero, Ichiru, tonight in the Seattle ballpark for the very first time (Go Mariners!),
(4) trying to craft a press kit for Coastal Women for Change in East Biloxi,
(5) thinking about my little ones in Old Lyme after a day of canoeing,
(6) wondering how my journalist daughter is doing in Chile,
(7) wondering how my little grandson is doing inside my daughter in Portland,
(8) scanning several books about software development for work,
(9) monitoring my fantasy baseball team, the Mud Lake Mafia (don't ask),
(10) questioning which of two books given to me recently would be best to read first -- "I Thought My Father Was God" by Paul Auster, and "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" by Haruki Murakami,
(11) feeling grateful to the writer Aimee Bender, whom I don't believe I have ever met, for her astonishing voice and sense of pace, which inspired the best thing I've written here in ages -- "Babble On" the other day,
(12) enjoying leftovers from a meal a friend cooked me the other night (it is so nice when a woman stops by and 'takes care of' me in this way,
(13) feeling sad for my friend Susan Hoffman, who's mother has died,
(14) worrying about my neice Caitlin, who is recovering from knee surgery so she can resume her collegiate soccer career,
(15) hoping J down in Mississippi will take her much-needed break soon because she needs one,
(16) thinking about how much fun this fall will be, coaching little league again, this time for the "Rockies,"
(17) looking at a stack of five new storage boxes in my apartment, and feeling how good it makes me feel to house things belonging to my family and friends,
(18) wanting any person who has left her stuff with me to understand that means she is part of my family -- permanently.