We Got One
October 31, 2025
Sherlock Holmes, complete with pipe, was our only trick or treater. That’s one more than we got last year. I like the trend.
I was also glad, if we were going to get only one trick or treater, that it was a costume I recognized. I’d read a list this morning of this year’s most popular costumes, and I didn’t know a single one (characters from KPop Demon Hunters, Labubu and Wicked). I’d have really fumbled at the door if our one visitor was wearing one of those.
Here’s a shot of our kitchen window from the front porch …
Also: Dodgers won tonight. There will be a game #7.
The Knife Cometh Back
October 30, 2025
Here’s what happened:
Jim and I were flying home from Seattle about a month ago, following our 2-week trip to the PNW (yet to be blogged, but it’s coming soon). We packed an extra suitcase to carry hiking gear and opted to carry that on. We checked our other two bags of regular stuff. Among the hiking gear was a first aid kit, including my Swiss Army knife, which, of course, I’d forgotten was in there… and which got the attention of the TSA agent. She pulled the suitcase aside, honed right in on the first aid kit, extracted the knife and did the equivalent of a finger wag.
I didn’t want to give up my knife (like everyone else who ever gets an item confiscated at TSA). She was quick to point out an option: mail it home. She nodded toward a small kiosk just twenty yards away.
Huh. I didn’t know you could do that. Not sure you can at most airports, but at SeaTac you sure can.
Well done, Seattle.
So… I did that. Knives are something very frequently confiscated, and there were instructions dedicated to how, specifically, to ship those. It was all pretty easy and fairly quick. I caught up to Jim just minutes later at our gate. And a month later, the knife arrived. Very, very cool.
Over the Scorekeeping Moon!
October 29, 2025
You know what I learned tonight? How much I love scorekeeping. I knew I loved it for all the years I did it, but I’d forgotten how much. I’m sad there are only two more (if the Dodgers get lucky) games in the World Series and then baseball season is over for the year.
Scorekeeping checks all my ocd boxes: counting things, documenting every little thing, totaling things, making columns and rows match.
Plus? Baseball.
Found a scorebook with some blank pages (this one was from July 2015.. ten years ago) at the top of a stack of scorebooks, stats, rosters, tournament programs, newspaper clippings, certificates, and a couple of varsity letters. The stack was on top of a file box that was also filled to the brim with baseball documentation and memorabilia dating back to T-Ball days. Well organized and labeled, I might add.
(Just to underscore the depth of my documentation fetish.)
From tonight’s game (the 5th of a, hopefully, seven game series) between the LA Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays. The Jays won and now lead 3-2 in the series. The teams travel to Toronto and resume play on Friday the 31st (Halloween, I just realized!).
Things of beauty, no?
Still Life With Pumpkins
October 28, 2025
‘Tis the pumpkin season.
(Wish those bananas didn’t have their stickers on them. If I’da known I was going to turn this into a seasonal still life, I’da removed those tacky stickers.)
Bottom 18
October 27, 2025
Thank goodness for that Freddie Freeman fella, who whacked (finally) a walk-off solo home run to end a game that had started nearly 7 hours earlier, and give the Dodgers a win … as well as a 2-1 lead over the Toronto Blue Jays in the World Series. As fantastic as the game was — and it truly was a stunning game for the ages (glad I saw it!) — I was losing patience. I mean, a 9-inning game is long enough, but this was two full nine inning games in one.. an 18 inning game! And nobody had scored a run since about the 7th inning, so this spectator was starting to get frustrated. But … I couldn’t look away. I was there for every pitch, every hit, every blown opportunity, every new pitcher (there may have been twenty pitchers in this game!).. all of it.
Anyway, look it up, it will surely be record setting in so many categories and my description will not do it any justice at all. I did listen to the post game analysis (A-Rod, Derek Jeter, Big Poppy (wow), and that one other guy named Kevin, I think) and know for a fact this game will be going down in history as one of the greats.
As happens every year during the World Series, Jim and I become overnight fans, rooting like nutcases for Our Team! We typically know not a single player, but we get to know them fast and have the nerve to get angry with them when they don’t perform to our liking. It’s shameless. (Hilarious, really.)
Anyway.. now we love Ohtani, and Freddie, and Mookie and that cute Will Smith.
Isn’t this a sweet pic? It’s Freddie hugging Dave Roberts, the Dodger manager. He looks more exhausted and relieved than happy, but sure he’s all three.
I’m Not the First
October 26, 2025
That’s probably true of absolutely everything, but it’s now certifiably true about my garden faces. Marty commented on my most recent FB post that featured the latest — and last — of the season’s garden faces. He said something about how Arcimboldo would be proud. Not knowing who (or what) that was, I AI Googled and learned me some art facts.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, also spelled Arcimboldi (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe artʃimˈbɔldo];[1] 5 April 1527 – 11 July 1593), was an Italian Mannerist painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and books.[2]
These works form a distinct category from his other productions. He was a conventional court painter of portraits for three Holy Roman Emperors in Vienna and Prague; also producing religious subjects and, among other things, a series of coloured drawings of exotic animals in the imperial menagerie. He specialized in grotesque symbolical compositions of fruits, animals, landscapes, or various inanimate objects arranged into human forms.[3][full citation needed]
The still life portraits were clearly partly intended as curiosities to amuse the court, but critics have speculated as to how seriously they engaged with Renaissance Neo-Platonism or other intellectual currents of the day.
Whattaya know.
Here’s a sample, probably the most famous of his fruit (and vegetable and flower) faces:
I’ll have to up my game in 2026.
Political Row
October 25, 2025
Spent a few hours on political row at this morning’s Farmer’s Market, staffing the Sister District Prop 50 booth. Had a ball. Saw so many folks (including new-to-town nephew + wife), had so many fruitful conversations (see what I did there?).
Here’s a nice pic of me and two of the dozen or so Davis College Dems who showed up to canvass for Prop 50. Yay young folks, yay everybody. I’m feeling good about this thing.
Happy About…
October 24, 2025
:: Happy that it’s the end of another growing season. Funny, isn’t it? It’s so wonderful to have a robust crop of tomatoes, squash, eqgplant, basil, strawberries, chard, rosemary, chives, lemons, figs… AND it’s nice when the season’s over, too. Raising food can be oddly stressful.
This guy is likely my final garden face for the season. Everything’s looking a little long in the tooth. I was not aware that we’d planted parsnips.. but I do believe that’s what the nose is. What a .. surprise.
:: Also happy that tonight is the first night of the World Series (starts in 11 mins, so I gotta hurry here). Go Dodgers… unless they are crushing the Blue Jays, in which case we’ll have to become Toronto fans to even things out. Go Blue in Game #7. We’ll see how all this plays out.
:: Happy to be going to see Jeremy Allen White as Springsteen tonight (after the baseball game). I really like that guy. Eager to see him in a non-moody chef role.
:: Happy about the conversation — long overdue — that we had with Peter yesterday afternoon. Holy cow I love that guy.
:: Happy that I finally cleared out all my unread emails and have only 700+ emails in my inbox (champ!) and only 300+ tabs open in my Chrome browser (double champ!). Been a productive couple of days in that regard.
I had intended to list many more HAPPY things, and to accompany the happy list with a NOT HAPPY list, but I don’t want to miss the first pitch.
Bendy as a Gumby
October 23, 2025
Caught Jim performing his morning footwear switcheroo .. from tennis shoes to work boots. Looking pretty good there, Jim!
Today’s Adventure in Basic Cooking
October 22, 2025
I know.. I’m 69 and have never made a real pot roast*. I don’t think I could have told you e x a c t l y what a pot roast was, until today. Pretty much, it’s exactly what the name implies: a pot roast.
Duh.
Jim suggested yesterday that I make one. I looked through my saved recipes (that crazy-stuffed basket — well organized, I might add — of hundreds (maybe thousands) of recipes I’ve printed off the internet) and found numerous pot roast recipes (not surprised). Picked two: the Ina Garten one and a Southern Living one, and married them.
First you pat dry, season, dredge in flour and brown the thing (a prime boneless chuck roast), then set it aside:
Then you cook til tender carrots, onions (I used yellow and green), garlic, celery:
Then add red wine, cognac, chicken broth, tomatoes and bundled fresh herbs (I used rosemary only, having just discovered all our thyme got snuffed out by our overgrown sage):
Then add back the chuck:
The pot then moves into a 325 degree oven for an hour, then the temp gets reduced to 250 for another hour and a half. An hour before it was done, I added potatoes.
And… voila, my first pot roast:
It was a thing to behold, and quite tasty. We’ll eat it a couple more times this week and froze two more dinners-worth. That’s 5 meals for two.. for about $50. Nice.
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(*) I have made numerous briskets, corn beef and other beef slab dishes in the crockpot, but I feel like those weren’t real pot roasts.
Life of Wry 