60 is the New 40

Hello:

Today I turned 60, but I don't feel like it. I ride my bike everywhere around here.

The picture here is me in Hong Kong. You see downtown Hong Kong in the background of this picture. We are on a hill and park just outside of Hong Kong.

I have all the necessary ingredients to make fudge tomorrow morning. It seems odd to me that 7 oz of marshmallow cream, 12 squares of chocolate and 5 oz of evaporated milk makes four pounds of fudge. Maybe it is the 3 cups of sugar added to this mixture.

Most of my family here will get food I made this summer or this winter. I am learning to cook. I could ask my ex-wife for her fruitcake recipe but I don't like to eat fruitcake (it is on my new Popcorn list).

Tomorrow I take out my second batch of sauerkraut from the crock. I will can all of this sauerkraut. My dad will get more than a few jars of this stuff for Christmas. (Sauerkraut is on my Cheese list--something I will never eat as I don't like the taste of sauerkraut).

What do you do with many green tomatoes? I have quite a few of them.

My to-do list for tomorrow is

1) Make fudge

2) Can sauerkraut

3) Clean out garden area.

After every event I must sit down with a heat pad on my back. My back is very tender still.

I am reading The Men Who Stare at Goats, a 2004 book on a black ops for spies who tried to kill goats with thoughts. One general, early in the book, thinks he can walk through walls. Walls have molecules and he has molecules, so it should be, he thought, he could move his mass through the mass of the wall. All he got was a sore nose from his efforts.

Except for Harry Potter, I do not like to see movies based on books I read. Having read all of the Twilight series, I find the movies lacking many important scenes that carry the story forward. Also characters in the book with big roles are not explained in the short movie time. All of this points to the fact I will not got see the movie The Men Who Stare at Goats.

I picked up 3 more books from the library today.

On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bears by Richard Ellis. I saw him on Sunday on BookTV; ordered the book from the library as I watched the TV program. It was ready by yesterday. This book comes from the Stayton Library.

Super Freakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dunbar. This book is from the Newberg Library. I really like the previous book by these authors, Freakonomics.

The last book is Typhoon by Charles Cummings. From the Silverton Library, this is a novel I hear or read about two weeks ago. Set in Hong Kong near the time of the transfer of ownership to China and later near and around the Olympics in Beijing.

I cooked dinner here for Nolan tonight then we went to the DQ for ice cream. I got a larger than usual Chocolate Extreme Blizzard. It now sits half eaten near me here.

From my to-do list for tomorrow you can see I took it easy today, after all I am 60 today.

Hope you have a great week. Stay warm.

Steven