Yes, it's true that one time the reason I drove from Colorado to Oklahoma to visit Jeri was to take a bottle of Bailey's Pumpkin Spice liqueur to her. One reason it was so compelling was I so seldom come up with an idea of what to give someone, so when I think of something, I have to act on it.

Part of my problem is I have so much stuff in my house, all wonderful things that I inherited or acquired back when I was young and foolish about money, I can't imagine adding more to it, and I transfer that feeling to my friends and acquaintances: can't imagine that they want more stuff, either. Food used to be a fool-proof gift until all the gluten-free, vegan, low carb, non-alcoholic, you name it, lifestyles came along.

Sometimes I have made hand-embroidered dish towels to give as gifts. The fabric is old-fashioned muslin, big squares of it that are handy for snapping at people (or flies) in the kitchen once the dishes are dried, or could be used for first aid bandages and slings if needed. But my esteem of these items is probably much higher than the potential recipients' and besides a lot of the friends my age and older already have drawers full of hand-embroidered dish towels they made when they were younger. And I think younger people who never hand-dry dishes haven't a clue what to do with them.

Speaking of pumpkin spice, I just saw a recipe for pumpkin spice coffee. This is naive of me, but I thought there would be actual pumpkin in it, with spices so it might taste like pumpkin pie. No. It's milk, coffee, sugar, whipped cream, and pumpkin pie spice, a bit of a letdown. To me, it would taste like sweet milky coffee with nutmeg/cinnamon/allspice/ginger etc. for flavoring. No pumpkin.

Speaking of flies, the other day I was at someone's house and what I thought was an over-done squirt gun that resembled an assault rifle was a salt gun for killing flies. The official name is A-Salt something. It uses common table salt in scatter-shot spurts to kill flies. Because it doesn't get as close as a fly swatter, they don't see it coming, so it's reasonably accurate. I told someone about it, and they were horrified at the thought of all that salt getting sprayed around the house. I didn't look closely, but didn't notice that being a problem at that house where we were happily killing or at least stunning flies. Vacuum cleaner would suck it right up. I was going to get one, but the reviews on Amazon seemed to trend toward the parts wear out in a few weeks, and no replacement parts are available. I considered buying two so I'd have spare parts, but if it was always the same part, that wouldn't work for long. I'm going to give it a pass, stick with the old-fashioned fly swatters, work on my accuracy.

I think I might have seen a mouse scurry across the rug out of the corner of my eye. Going to go find the cat.