When your day begins with the oven making a persistent beeping noise every ten seconds and refusing to turn on. Of course, the apartment building maintenance folks aren't even willing to _tell me what kind of oven I have_ (It's an unlabeled GE electric range single oven from 1992, I think?) so I can try and look up the correct manual; they told me to call my landlord to get his permission. So I've called my landlord, The Mysterious Zsolt, or rather his personal assistant, Manzer (I swear I'm not making the names up), who said he'd talk to Zsolt who'd talk to the building people. Meanwhile, I have pulled the oven halfway into the kitchen so I could unplug it and stop the beeping noise (no, replugging it doesn't help anything.)

I need an oven by Thanksgiving. Luckily the range still works, as does the microwave, but...

Monday continued with a lunch wherein my toddler managed to cover half of the golden retriever with butternut squash soup. Luckily, Eowyn didn't really seem to object.

But then Mac redeemed himself by being, as I referred to him for a moment before washing out my brain, a good little house elf. I had told him we were going to Trader Joe's, and went to the dryer to get a clean pair of socks. I sat down in the living room to put on the socks, and Mac disappeared into the hallway and came back a second later, bringing me my shoes. :) Also, when he woke up from his nap, he just sat in his crib flipping through his book of nursery rhymes very intently.

Our Trader Joe's has gone into massive holiday mode, though there is a shocking lack of Decadent Chocolate Frosting. A new product is Dried Mangosteens, which may be of interest to those of you who are mangosteenophiles. I just like the word. Someday I will create a character who is the Duchess of Mangosteen. Also, they have many different varieties of Belgian chocolate suitable as inexpensive host gifts.

Speaking of chocolate, the last thing to mention today is a brief review of the Vosges Haut Chocolat Bacon Chocolate Bar (ladybird97 may choose to ignore the next bit, along with other kosher folks.) It is, in fact, a rich milk chocolate bar with sea salt and little bacon bits. We had high hopes, given that the inspiration was the taste of chocolate chip pancakes next to hot bacon, but it was honestly a bit disappointing. You get a taste of smoke and salt, but not really the crunchy meaty taste that is bacon. A. thinks it would work better to have chocolate-dipped bacon strips. I think this is taking excessive up to 11.