Tomorrow is the last Sunday before Advent, or "Stir-Up Sunday", when the Anglosphere starts its Christmas baking. So today is hunting and gathering day, when I spend a ridiculous amount of money on dried fruit and ransack the supermarket for butter that doesn't cost the Earth, except it does. Somewhere deep down in the heart of me I remain convinced that the right price for butter is $1.98 a pound.

Snow continues to fall across southwestern Ontario. It's not particularly cold, just below freezing, so driving conditions get treacherous as the wet snow quickly packs down into ice. Each intersection is an intelligence test: Which driver will remember to take her foot off the accelerator in time to avoid skidding around the corner, and who still hasn't made the switch to winter tires?

This matters to me today, for I am going to Kitchener in search of Valencia oranges. (Because fruitcake.) If there's a Valencia orange anywhere in Stratford, it's in the Witness Protection Program.

The rest of the weekend program is mostly about laundry and house dust. It's time to get out the feather duvet and wrestle it into its cover, so I might as well wash the bed linen and towels, and scramble under the bed to banish the colony of dust bunnies breeding down there. I must also wash the floor in the kitchen and front hall, where the tracks of the furnace technician are as clear as pugmarks in fresh mud, but that thrill can wait for tomorrow.

The first signs of this winter's eczema appeared on my left hand this morning. Not fair.