You know Carolyn's gone Crazy When:

As we all know this past Saturday we celebrated Halloween, the official start of the holiday season. At work my department decided to dress up like a zoo. I reluctantly put on some cat ears and called myself a panther, but what I was really excited about was the pumpkin cinnamon rolls I planned to make.

Thursday night I came home from work and went straight to the kitchen. I used home pureed pumpkin for them. They rose, I filled and baked and they smelled delicious, all seventeen of them. But, I wanted to make sure they tasted okay. I took a bite of one and wasn't sure. I was mostly confident there was no way I could let other people eat these, but I wanted to get a second opinion. Enter husband. Now Steve is a frank person, but he also knows how much food means to me, so when I asked his opinion at first he hmmed and haaahed. But then, as he swallowed he started coughing and asked for a cup of water. Nice. "You can't win them all he said." I left his study and sat on the couch trying to resolve the issue.

That's when the little guy on my shoulder started talking. "You could always go to the store and buy canned pumpkin; you know it will be better like that." Turning to the left, "But, it will take all that work and it's already 8:45; you need to go to bed on time." And to the right, "You can't afford to go buy donuts in the morning; if you start now you can have them rising and can bake them in the morning." I'm not sure which voice was wearing the red, but it took me about 30 seconds to put on some shoes and head to Target.

Target is the closest grocery store to my house. Although I should call it Super Target. The food makes it super I suppose. I arrived at 8:50pm and rushed to the baking isle. First I grabbed dark brown sugar (the recipe called for this and on my first attempt used light and I needed all the help I could get). Then I looked around for the pumpkin and probably to nobody's surprise there wasn't any on the shelf. But, no fear, I'll grab a sales associate because surely there must be some in stock room. "I'm looking for canned pumpkin?" "Oh, we're out, he was looking for it too, we've been out for a month now." Now, I can understand being out of canned pumpkin; it is the Autumn season, pumpkin is popular. But, really, did the person doing the ordering not think that the month they ordered 10 times as much candy that maybe one person in the entire city of Fort Worth would want to bake something containing pumpkin. Really?

Like a maniac I headed back to the baking isle, tossed the brown sugar back on the shelf and after questioning my sanity for about 1.5 seconds headed to Tom Thumb, the second closest grocery store from out house. I got there about 9:05 and rushed inside, then realized people were probably looking at me like I was crazy, after all who needs to run to the pumpkin when there's only 5 other people in the store. It's not like there was going to be a stampede for the pumpkin. One miracle and a self check out later and we were in business.

I've never mixed dough so quickly in my life, and let me say that yeast works a lot faster when you're not waiting for it to work. But, at 10:30 I was in bed with pumpkin cinnamon rolls in the refrigerator waiting to be baked. I don't know what was so important about the bloody rolls, but there's a certain satisfaction knowing that I won