I’m on Word as I write this and I’ll try to transfer it without losing it to Safari. A while ago now, when this mess first began, I was making a list of facts about food that I never learned until later in life. You probably know them all, but I’m going to list a few things anyway.

1) Cut out the little green core inside a garlic clove. Sometimes it’s not green.

2) Peel a Portobello mushroom and remove the gills. (I freeze the detritus for soup stock.)

3) Pare the white crust on Brie or Camembert with a vegetable peeler. That way you don’t get a mouthful of dry skin. You can put the peeling into the soup stock bag.

4) Cut lines on the outside of a pomegranate (half, quarter, eighths?) and then slice through, dropping the pieces into a bowl of water. Peel the white part off the arils (nice word!) and you end up with a bowl full of red jewels. I would say tasty but I hate that word.

5) According to the Vogue Book of Etiquette, which I inherited from a favourite aunt, there are two things you can pick up with your fingers to eat. One is crisp bacon, the other is asparagus. I learned from this how to cook asparagus. You cannot pick up limp asparagus.

6) Don’t get too fussy, though. I have a friend who takes half an hour to prepare raisins to go into her breakfast oatmeal, because she picks over each one to make sure no stem survives. Ditto blueberries. I figure our digestive systems can manage the odd raisin or blueberry stem so I let them pass. But I do ream out shrimp if it hasn't been cleaned.

That’s enough. I actually began this on December the first but an angel of mercy came bearing chocolates, wisdom and practical advice about my recalcitrant computers. (Hint: it’s not their fault.)

And so: Happy December the Second.

The meteorologist on the television news tonight reported that this has been one of the warmest Novembers on record. Certainly, it was the sunniest. I suffer from SAD – Seasonal Affective Disorder – and it keeps getting worse as we slouch toward the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice when, according to how far north you live, you - - not you, I – yearn for light. It wasn’t too bad this year because there were so many sunny days. Even as good as it was, by early evening I get antsy because it’s so dark and I think I’m late for something, not sure what.

After the solstice, and when we enter the New Year, the minuscule lengthening of each day in January changes my perspective and I lighten up too. Oh dear, if I go on (and on and on, Safari willing) with this blog, you are going to know all my secrets, well, not secrets exactly, but foibles. As a few of you know, the precious few who read my blog, you know that I have been less voluble in the past week or so than is my wont. That’s because Safari has been cutting me off and erasing what I’ve written. So I started writing in Word and transferring but even then I had trouble. I have a lot of writing to do these days, even more than usual, so other media have had my attention.

Oh, and I joined Twitter, thanks to a technologically advanced granddaughter. One hundred and forty characters constitute a very brief blog. Years ago I had a radio “show”, if you can all it that, comprising 900 words, or a minute and a half, a thought for the day that I titled “Happy Homilies”, coming from your Big Sponsor in the Sky, aka the United Church of Canada. I used to write about two dozen of them and go into a studio and record them, allowing for ones that didn’t work, three weeks’ worth (15) at a time. My producer preferred that I record in the afternoon. Then as now I swam every morning and he said my pipes gurgled too much if I tried to sustain level speech too soon after swimming.

I used to say I had developed a 900-word mind. Now, I have to work toward a 140-character mind. My blog is somewhere between.

When it’s there.