Month: December 2020

Monday, December 21   Deaths  1,347 (+6)   New cases  846

It’s the 270th day of Pandemic Diary record keeping, time for another chart update.

The number of deaths per day in the most recent 10-day period it was 21.1. The trend is still upward, but the increase is noticeably less steep than it was in the previous thirty days. In terms of COVID deaths per 100,000 residents, Oregon’s rate is now 31.3.

Tuesday, December 22   Deaths  1,382 (+35)   New cases  1,282

We packed a lunch and went up into the Cascades today. We didn’t know exactly what we would find, so we thought of it as a hike and/or a snowshoe walk, which is pretty much what it turned out to be. We went to a place called Lost Prairie, which is just the other side of Tombstone Pass. It’s closer to us than other sites, but generally has less snow than the really good places, especially this early in the season. For that reason we hadn’t been there in years. 

Wednesday, December 23   Deaths  1,403 (+21)   New cases  1,000

We had our Turkish lesson today (Christmas Eve Eve) and reviewed what in English would be called gerunds and infinitives in before/after clauses.  The teach gave this example: “After learning grammar, understanding is easy.” “Dilbilgisini oğrendikten sonra anlamak kolay.” I know it sounds like teacher propaganda, but it’s more or less true. Even people who hate and fear grammar and who are convinced that their grammar is terrible–even those people–have in fact learned all of the really important grammar points if only through natural absorption, which they didn’t notice at the time. 

We got another Christmas card with a short letter. Toward the end of the letter our correspondent noted that 

My cat, Bootsy, went to Kitty Heaven last March. 11 years old. He bit  R really bad, tore skin off of wrist and arm. R feared him. Also nipped at 2 friends who were trying to play with him. I miss him, but it was necessary. 

No boasting about great trips and awesome accomplishments, and yet this writer never whines or complains either. A national treasure.

Speaking of treasures, E made chocolate peanut butter squares. She makes them just like chocolate peanut butter balls except that she doesn’t waste time making the silly shapes. Just whips ‘em right up in time for dinner. Yum.

Thursday, December 24   Deaths  1,415 (+12)   New cases  871

Last minute trip to the grocery store to pick up salmon, etc. Yuck. Busy. E went to visit with PF in the afternoon. They sat outside for a bit. P seems to be doing well. M checked air pressure in the tires on the car that we don’t use. Right rear was low, just as the dash warning claimed. Then it was time to make pecan pie. M made a crust, E made the filling, leaving M to monitor doneness. It looks pretty good. M’s night to make dinner: fondue, french bread and a green salad. After dinner we tried to watch the new Dolly Parton movie. Sigh. Good message, but too much singing of too sappy lyrics. 

Friday, December 25   Deaths  1,422 (+7)   New cases  908

Christmas itself is upon us. We breakfasted on scrambled eggs paired with a raspberry coffeecake. And of course we had stockings and presents. E got a couple of maple sugar snowmen and M got a Lego Ferrari. At elevenish we set off for Salem where we met up with the Andees at K and J’s house to exchange presents with them. C and her new beau were also there. They all came out to meet us and we talked for bit in the front yard. It was wonderful to see all of them. M noted later that there was a strong Becca thread running through the gathering–a mother, a sister, and two good friends. After our visit, we took the freeway south and stopped at the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge to walk through the ash wetland. We wondered if it would be crowded or not. (Christmas is national bird counting day.) But as it happened, we had the place all to ourselves–possibly because it was raining and the temperature was around 37 degrees. We walked to the end of the boardwalk and back–at a fairly brisk pace–and then ate our lunch in the car with the heater on. Nice.

Back at home E had a phone call with her brothers and a little later we did a Zoom meeting with the Andees to watch each other open presents. This was followed by a light but very delicious champagne and salmon dinner followed by a very delicious not so light serving of pecan pie. 

Also today, the OHA reported that a total of 17,130 Oregonians have received COVID-19 first vaccinations, all of them hospital workers or people in long-term care facilities. 

OHA also reports daily test numbers and daily new cases confirmed. Results for the past seven days are shown below.

	Daily tests	Daily new cases	Rate
Saturday 12/19	21,708	1,542	7.10%
Sunday 12/20	17,426	1,153	6.62%
Monday 12/21	17,506	846	4.83%
Tuesday 12/22	18,993	1,282	6.75%
Wednesday 12/23	26,459	1,000	3.78%
Thursday 12/24	19,586	871	4.45%
Friday 12/25	25,892	908	3.51%
weekly average	21,081	1,086	5.29%

Saturday, December 26   Deaths  1,422 (+0)   New cases  612

A quiet day on several fronts. No COVID deaths reported, which is a nice Christmas gift. One thing we have to say about this Pandemic Diary idea, it does get depressing when the news is bad. So let’s celebrate for just a moment.

We’re mostly just cleaning up and resting, though E is still doing Christmas related correspondence both on paper and via the great web.

Sunday, December 27   Deaths  1,427 (+5)   New cases  1,416

A sunny day drew M out to work in the yard. The temperature was in the low forties, good conditions for sod turning. E got the house ready for another visit from Pepper, whose owner is going in tomorrow for her second cataract surgery. Then at 3:00 we had a Zoom call with Jim and John, with the Andees dropping in as well. Technical difficulties delayed the start of the meeting slightly, but by 3:40 we were doing pretty good… We ended at 4:00 so as to give E time to go out to the country and pick up the dog before it got dark.

Monday, December 14   Deaths  1,161 (+35)   New cases  1,180

M went shopping at Market of Choice while Eve waited for word from the Co-op about when her order would be ready. Before lunch we took Pepper for a longish walk in the forest, something he doesn’t often get to do. He was happy on the trail and mostly quiet at home all afternoon. 

We’re both working on homework for the Turkish class. There’s a lot to look at this week, including everyday vocabulary like seasons, months, days of the weeks, colors, numbers, and household items. All very useful. In case anyone is curious: Bugün ondört aralık pazartesi. (Today is Monday the fourteenth of December and the days of the week and the names of months are not capitalized in Turkish–I think.)

Eve’s grocery order was ready by around three in the afternoon. She paid over the phone, including the $5 service fee and then went over to the shop to pick it up.

Tuesday, December 15   Deaths  1,214 (+54)   New cases  1,129

A very high number of deaths reported today, but the Oregon Health Authority reports that this is partly due to the fact that there was a sizable backlog of death certificates that needed final processing by the CDC before the results could be announced. The backlog was cleared today.

Speaking of the pandemic, it seems that the Post Office has issued some COVID-19 commemoratives just in time for the holiday season. E got this sheet today when she asked for international forever stamps. 

Wednesday, December 16   Deaths  1,262 (+48)   New cases  1,562

An eventful morning for E, who had to prepare breakfast for both herself and our guest and also take the guest for a walk, all of this before 9:00 when our Zoom Turkish lesson started. M helped by making breakfast for himself and enough coffee for two, but was otherwise mostly useless all day. Pepper was picked up by another member of the care team before lunch, which left us once again dogless–and ready to relax a little. But E went right to work on some Christmas letters and cookie making. 

Rainy, cold, and dark today, typical December. In Turkish today we practiced adjective clauses by saying things like “Is August the month you like the best?” and “No, August is the month I hate the most.” In theory, then, we should be able to say something like “What’s the name of the president that you liked so much?” Actually that pushing things a bit, but let’s try anyway. How about this: O çok sevdiğin başkanın adı ne? (Literally, “He much that you like president’s name what is?) For the grammarians among you, one interesting thing here is that the verb in the clause is not marked for tense as it would be in English. Also, in English, the use of “that” as a clause marker is optional in this kind of clause, whereas in Turkish the “diği” part is required.

And speaking of things that people like or don’t like, we got a card yesterday that included a Christmas letter. Here are the first few lines of the letter:

2020, what a dismal year. China virus, grandchildren not in school, extra-curricular sports cancelled or very limited, shelter in place, travel bans, quarantines, unnecessary political investigations, a vindictive impeachment process, and the radical left will be in the White House.

So yeah, it’s been that kind of year. 

It strikes us that this letter could serve as a template. For that to work, we could just blank out a few words here and there and then people could fill in the blanks according to personal preference:

2020, what a dismal year. _____________ virus, grandchildren not in school, extra-curricular sports cancelled or very limited, shelter in place, travel bans, quarantines, ______________ investigations, a _______________ impeachment process, and the __________________ in the White House.

Thursday, December 17   Deaths  1,2830 (+21)   New cases  1,339

Tertulia today with R and J. We compared notes about Christmas dinner plans. We’re all of us thinking of salmon. J is going to bake hers in phyllo dough with rice and kale. She plans to make a lot so as to have some to share with her kids and their families who all live here in town. Our plans are not fixed, but I suspect our salmon will be simpler. 

We drove over to the coast today, a lovely hour or so featuring periods of bright sun with lots of clouds and showers in between. We stopped in Newport for a coffee and then went south to Ona Beach. We walked across the bridge and onto the wide, flat beach that was littered with foam. It was windy and cold out there, but it was nice to see the far horizon away beyond the chaotic breakers. Just a few minutes after we turned back toward the parking lot, the rains came. We stayed comfortable in our hooded coats with the wind at our backs. When we arrived back in Corvallis a little after 4:30, it was already early evening. It made us remember that the winter solstice is not so far away.

Friday, December 18   Deaths  1,304 (+21)   New cases  1,390

The sun is low on the horizon these days, but at least it was shining today all morning and into the afternoon. That was long enough to dry off our outdoor table–the last thing left for us to winterize. We’re leaving it out again this year, so it just needed to be covered. M gave it two layers, inner green and outer beige. The only question now is how soon they will blow loose. As if on cue, the rain came back strong in the early evening. The table was fine, but we got kind of wet on our before dinner walk.

Saturday, December 19   Deaths  1,340 (+36)   New cases  1,542

More rain is expected today and tomorrow, lots of it apparently, as we’ve been getting flood warnings. They expect the rivers to rise. Well, that happens a lot here this time of year.

We’ve been planning for Christmas. Looks like we’ll see the Andees at least briefly to exchange gifts and greetings on Christmas day. Before that we’re hoping to get in a snowshoe trip on Monday or Tuesday. And we have been thinking, just a little, now and again, about food: salmon, coffee cake, chocolate pecan pie, things like that. Dinner today is take-out from Ba’s Vietnamese, large portions that we can stretch to make two meals.

COVID vaccine is now being administered to local health care workers. There is some confusion about how many doses will be available and how soon, but at least it has begun. The bad news is that the death rate is higher than ever and still growing. Oregon marked its 1,000th COVID death on December 4, about nine months after the pandemic began. Since then there have been 340 additional deaths in just 15 days. 

Sunday, December 20  Deaths  1,341 (+1)   New cases  1,153

We made an emergency trip to the grocery store this morning. Just had to buy some jam for cookie making. Was this really essential? Hard to say. It was relatively quick and painless. We walked over to MofC, then E went in while M hung around outside sheltering from the rain in the doorway of frozen yogurt place, which happened to be closed. Lots of rain these days with temps pushing 50. 

E organized a Zoom birthday celebration in the early afternoon. Beside the two of us and Andrea, guests included our old friend Helen as well as her daughter and her son, his partner, and one of Helen’s grandchildren. It was fun to catch up with this group and see how everyone is doing. Three different members of this crowd have birthdays in December, hence the need for a celebration. Eve prepared a three-candled birthday cake–which resembled half a bagel– and we all sang Happy Birthday. 

Once that was done, E got right into cookie making. M did a little email, a little Merleau-Ponty, and a little sampling of cookie dough. Dinner comes from the freezer today–leftovers from Thanksgiving.

Monday, December 7    Deaths   1,045 (+12)   New cases  1,331

Early on a Monday morning the Mother of Markets was almost empty. We went there together. We know you’re not supposed to do that. But it’s a big airy place and E is getting tired of the Co-op, with its low ceilings and narrow aisles. We split up to do much of the shopping, so we were in and out fairly quickly. We spent a lot of money, though; there’s nothing cheap about Mother of Markets. The good news today was that our grapefruit shipment arrived from Pittman-Davis in Texas. Otherwise, just the normal stuff, a Zoom class, some puttering around outside, naps in the afternoon, and a long walk after dinner to see the Christmas lights in a nearby neighborhood. 

Tuesday, December 8   Deaths  1,080 (+35)   New cases  1,341

Grapefruit for breakfast. Harika! After that, we had to attack our Turkish homework to prep for tomorrow’s lesson. We had a couple of vocabulary worksheets focusing on more or less common adjectives. Go ahead, ask either of us how to say “soft cotton” or “slow turtle” in Turkish. You could even ask us to say “soft turtle” and “fast cotton” if you wanted to. We could do it. Of course you’d have to ask us to do that pretty soon, because, at our age, we don’t know how long we’re going to remember these words. We also had to prepare short oral presentations. E’s is about a dog; M’s is about a car. This took all morning; it was past noon when we knocked off for lunch. In the afternoon we went for a walk in the forest. The weather was nice, partly cloudy with temps in the high forties.

The Turkish word for forest is orman. The word for in is da and in Turkish it comes after the noun instead of before. So ormanda means in the forest . The word for walk is yürü and and the past tense first person plural verb ending is dük. So yürüdük means we walked. Therefore, We walked in the forest would be Yürüdük ormanda. Except it isn’t. In Turkish the verb and all its endings come at the end of the sentence. Hence: Ormanda yürüdük. All this stuff is really easy once you get used to it. We know this from personal experience, not because we personally are used to it because we’re not, but we have personally listened to Turks speaking Turkish. You should hear them when they get going. None of it bothers them at all. Little kids even…

After our walk M found time to wrap two presents and waste some time online. E found time to continue to support local clothing stores in their time of trouble. This time she didn’t want to go inside the store, which is a bit cramped. She found, however, that they have put much of their inventory onto a website. So she used that to make her selection and to pay. Then she called and made arrangements to go downtown and have the sweater brought out to her rather than shipped.

Watched another episode of The Crown. The Duke of Windsor has died. Charles has fallen for Camilla. Good acting and writing. Nice cars. But it’s a swindle, this mingling of fact and fiction. It’s just another kind of reality TV. 

Wednesday, December 9   Deaths  1,110 (+30)   New cases  1,205

Turkish class. Walk up the hill. Wrap presents. Prepare xmas letter. Random reviews via Zoom. Country Strings via Zoom. The guest on Country Strings was David Alvin. David and Phil Alvin came to some prominence in the 80’s in a band called The Blasters. David’s musical inspiration, then and now, was roots music, especially blues, about which his knowledge seems vast. In the Zoom session from his home in California, Alvin played some of his own songs that featured wonderful acoustic blues guitar. Awesome. American Strings is a local university-sponsored free concert series, and since it is now on Zoom, it is available to all. We don’t know the line-up for 2021, but past guests have included Noel Paul Stookey, Tom Paxton, Sarah Jarosz, Roseanne Cash, Country Joe McDonald, Carlene Carter, and Bill Frisell. The format is half an hour of music talk followed by a half an hour of live performance.

After posting last week’s Pandemic Diary, we have had an outpouring of support for our Christmas tree. We have been urged to be more mindful of its feelings when we report about it and we are taking this advice to heart. However, honesty compels us to report that the tree has developed a drinking problem. The tree’s caregivers have noted an extraordinarily high level of liquid intake. This is not meant as a criticism, merely a matter of concern at this point. The tree’s behavior has been placid and uncomplaining with no sign of wobbling or other instability, at least so far…

Thursday, December 10   Deaths  1,123 (+13)   New cases  1,286

FaceTime tertulia with J and R this morning, then E went right into Zoom Better Bones and Balance while M noodled around on the computer. Dull weather today, thick morning fog giving way to a featureless gray sky. Cold rain showers in the late afternoon. With not a breath of wind, the raindrops fall straight down, thousands of perfectly parallel vectors. 

E’s hair stylist is retiring at the end of the month; they had their last appointment today. E’s hair looks great. But what will she do now?

Friday, December 11   Deaths  1,138 (+15)   New cases  1,610

It’s the 260th day of the pandemic and the Oregon death rate continues to rise steeply. The number of deaths per 100,000 residents has reached 26.5. 

Saturday, December 12   Deaths  1,149 (+11)   New cases  1,440

Lovely day, not too cold, cloudy with periods of sun. E went out to the country again to take dog Pepper for a walk. Around midday, both of us worked outside doing fall chores, including pruning our respective roses. M pruned the ones in the back, a motley assortment inherited from the previous owners. E pruned the miniatures that we brought from our old house. They’re in large pots and are nice enough to go in front of the house.

In the afternoon M ventured out to the liquor store. Business was booming and the store was enforcing a limit of five customers in the store at any one time. At the checkout counter the store was still using a credit card reader that required a signature on a touchscreen. That seemed primitive at a time when other stores have moved to no-touch credit card readers. Ah but wait. As soon as M removed his card and the signing screen popped up, the clerk pulled the reader back, made a quick X on his behalf and wished him a nice day. Very sensible. 

Thus resupplied, we had a lot of fun doing a Zoom happy hour with B and B. For a Zoom background we used a photo from the last time the four of us went snowshoeing. 

Dinner was take-out from Pastinis. We ordered online, which we have done before, but this time the process failed. We received our confirmation email as usual, but when we arrived at the appointed time, the staff at the restaurant had never heard of us. Sigh. We reordered right then and waited in the car. It didn’t take too long, but it is not good to have such problems when one is hungry. As best we can tell, the transaction failed as soon as it was made, but despite the failure, the system (TableUp) sent us a confirmation anyway. TableUp baka desu. TableUp çok aptal. TableUp es estúpido.

Sunday, December 13   Deaths  1,155 (+6)   New cases  1,048

A day of rest. After we read the paper, M did the crossword and finished a mystery novel. E had a Zoom get-together with some old friends. We opened a shipment of new cotton/rayon towels, cabernet for M and raspberry for E. They are made in Turkey of course, because that’s where we became towel snobs. What a treat it was to buy towels there! Bur never mind the history. These new ones are lovely and feel very nice. As for how they perform, we shall see.

We’re trying out the idea of online grocery ordering and curbside pickup at the Co-op. E has submitted her list and the Co-op site tells us that they will call us when our order is ready, promising that this will be either Monday or Tuesday. We’ll pay on the phone and then go pick it up.

But the big news today is that we are having a houseguest. Pepper’s owner is having cataract surgery on Monday and won’t be able to care for him properly for a few days. E will go out and pick him up today just before dark. M will stay home and make spaghetti. 

We continue to hatewatch The Crown. Hopefully, we’ll be done soon.

Monday, November 30    Deaths   912 (+7)   New cases  1,314

Grocery shopping again today. M braved the vastness of Winco at 8:15 in the morning. It was far from empty, but it was even farther from its usual packed condition, which we have not seen lately but clearly remember from days past. Prices are good there, and it’s easy to find Reser’s bean and cheese burritos. Winco also has graham cracker crumbs, condensed milk, chocolate chips, and coconut–four critical Christmas items. Check-out was slow, with only two lanes open, and M was late getting back home. E was impatient, stamping her foot, probably the left one. Immediately as he arrived, she departed for the smaller and somewhat claustrophobic Co-op, where she did her part of the dreaded shopping. At least it was a nice morning to be out and about. Both shoppers reported seeing rainbows during their respective journeys. 

In the middle of the day, M glimpsed the sun and started putting up lights on the house, while E, with all critical items in hand, started work on The Bars. Later on, E delivered a birthday cookie to her friend A and picked up some take-out falafel for dinner. After dinner we sampled the bars. And after bars a little TV, the last two episodes of Bir Başkadır. The series had a nice ending. Basically everybody got in touch with their feelings–well, almost everybody–and felt a lot better. Even the little boy who never spoke started talking. Meryem fainted again, but that’s all right since it was mostly from happiness. 

Tuesday, December 1    Deaths  936 (+24)   New cases  1,223

The Oregon Health Authority reports today that there were 24 COVID deaths on Monday, a new daily record. Today is also the 250th day of the Pandemic Diary and so it is time for another chart. The news is grim. As always, the chart tracks average deaths per day per ten day period. Again the scale of our chart has had to change; the vertical axis now extends to twelve. 

The overall total of 936 COVID deaths brings Oregon’s per 100,000 rate to 21.76. The current rate for the U.S. as a whole is 81.93.

Wednesday, December 2    Deaths   953 (+17)   New cases  1,244

We started the day with Turkish class, always a bracing experience. After that, the main event was that we did some Christmas shopping. Stores are open in downtown Corvallis, but they seemed, from our limited experience, to be mostly empty. We were wondering about E’s favorite store, the place where we often get her present. So E called to see what the situation was there. They talked about how they were sanitizing everything after every customer and even offered her a private after hours appointment. It was also clear that hardly anyone was coming in. Also relevant is that the store is in an historic building with high ceilings and an open loft level. All in all, we decided to take a chance and do a modified version of our usual Christmas time custom. First, E went down to the store at 11:00 in the morning just as they opened. For most of her time there she was the only customer and there was only one person to assist her–which happened to be the owner. E picked out a number of things to try on, focusing on sweaters and eventually narrowing down her choices to half a dozen favorites. She then asked the owner to hold a group of the best items, so that M could come in and make final choices. (In this way E is sure to be pleased on Christmas Day and is generally also semi-surprised because by the time the day comes, she can’t really remember all the ones she tried.) M did his part of the process after lunch. The store was slightly more populated when he got there–two assistants and two other customers–still not much for such a large place.

For dinner, E is making her famous spinach lasanga. M will assist by opening and pouring a modest domestic red. Now that we have finished Bir Başkadır, we are somewhat at a loss for TV. 

Thursday, December 3    Deaths   973 (+20)   New cases   1,151

E was out walking early this morning and found the moon still bright in one direction and the sun just about to rise in the other.

Also in the morning came Zoom tertulia with J and R, a Zoom exercise class for E, and a haircut for M. For some years now, M’s barber has been splitting his time between the cutting business and the home building trades, especially painting. Lately he’s been into painting more and more. In times of pandemic it’s a lot less stressful to go into an empty house to paint it than it is work in close quarters with a parade of people. Good for him, not so good, maybe, for M.

After lunch we went up to the Baskett Slough refuge and walked around a bit. The refuge consists of oak savannah hills above many acres of wetland that provide winter habitat for ducks and geese. 

Friday, December 4    Deaths   1,003 (+30)   New cases  2,176

A busy day today. E spent the morning preparing and packing up Christmas presents for the faraways, then rushed off to the post office to mail them. She came back pleased with herself for having got there before the noon rush and having had to share the place with just one other customer. M, meanwhile, dealt with a failing kitchen light. It was a new LED type fixture, which means, as M discovered early in the process, that there are no bulbs to replace. Instead, the fixture is “integrated” which is to say that when one wears out, you buy a whole new one. Fortunately the replacement that M found was 1) not very expensive, and 2) required a kind of installation process that was not new at all. (Newness is all very nice, but there is only a certain amount that can be tolerated.)

After lunch, E and M should have just rested on their laurels and taken a couple of long naps. But instead, we ventured out to get a Christmas tree. And indeed we did get one. That is, we visited a kindly tree seller, selected a tree, paid $55, stuffed it into the back of the CX-5 and took it home. We placed it in a stand and looked at it. We noticed after a few moments that this was the most fundamentally misshapen tree that either of us had ever seen. The main trunk was in fact curved throughout much of its length, and not curved in any particularly elegant way. There was no possible way to make the top point straight up without somehow making the bottom go sideways. What kind of people could possibly have picked out such a tree? We shudder to think. Somehow we will just have to make this do. We will not, of course, be inviting anyone to our house to view our tree because of the pandemic, so there is that. We just have make sure that we don’t accidentally include it in a Zoom or FaceTime backgrounds.

To distract ourselves, we had to watch two episodes of The Crown. (We’re still in Season 3.)

Saturday, December 5    Deaths   1,027 (+24)  New cases 1,847

The number of COVID deaths in Oregon has been high recently, especially in the last five days. All signs suggest that this trend is likely to continue, at least for a time. As we learned very early on, deaths are the only reliable measure of the seriousness of the situation. Other numbers, including those based on case counts and those based on test positive ratios, may be useful and interesting in some ways, but they are problematic. The total of confirmed and presumptive cases, for example, rises steadily as more and more people are tested. But it is not feasible to establish with any certainty the relationship between that number and the number of people who actually have the disease, either during any one period or at any one moment . And those latter numbers are the ones that would be most interesting and most useful. As always, PD will continue to report daily Oregon death data. We will no longer report total cases as this number is becoming more and more complicated to interpret. We will continue to track the number of new cases reported daily. This number is heavily dependent on the number of tests given, but as long as testing in Oregon remains robust, the number of positives will generally be of interest. 

Sunday, December 6    Deaths   1,033 (+6)   New cases  1,290

Tomorrow is our major grocery shopping day, but this morning we made an early run to Market of Choice, so as to have some fresh salmon for dinner tonight. That was just after we had some croissants that E picked up from Le Patissier on Saturday. Darn good, even when a day old. And speaking of Saturday, that is when M took advantage of the dry weather to take the Porsche out for another spin. Went down Peoria Road a ways, turned east and made a loop back. Interesting route. The way back up passed a little more quickly than the way down. One advantage to driving in this season is that there were no bugs on the windshield when he got home.

Today after lunch we had Turkish coffee. Then E finished making the tree beautiful while M made refrigerator pickles. We keep thinking about the treats we’d like to make for the holidays season, but then we think about the weight we’re gaining. So far we’ve just had the bars; we’re holding off–so far–on the cappuccino truffles and the shortbread. We hardly need more treats when the sweets cupboard is bulging! Burst’s nonpareils, two bars pf Hershey’s dark , Dove dark chocolate hearts, Nestles semi-sweet chips, some leftover Halloween Almond Joys…Jeez.