Autumn is coming soon, and with it my favorite fall flavor, the very best of autumn.

I am not talking about pumpkin spice, that God-forsaken factory-made nightmare. I had a pumpkin spice latte exactly once, and I had violent orange-colored diarrhea exactly one half hour later. You can keep your pumpkin spice, and I shall keep my colon contents, thank you very much.

The flavor I am talking about is that of apples, the absolutely most wonderful food that fall gives us.

Now, you can get certain apples all year long, but fall is when many varieties are more widely available. And nobody wants to eat a Red Delicious, no matter what time of year it is. Gala, either, though I am shocked by the number of people who drop that dreck into their shopping carts. They are bland at best and flavorless at worst.

Please, if you are tempted to buy a Gala or Red Delicious apple, do us all a favor and scan the aisle for an apple staple—Pink Lady (aka Cripps Pink in some circles). It is not my absolutely most favorite apple, but it’s high up there and it is reliably tasty and has a decent shelf life. With Pink Lady so widely available, no one need eat a mediocre apple ever again.

How did I come to care so much about apples? Well, as a kid I ate quite a few. In those days, Red Delicious apples had not had the flavor bred out of them yet, and we had those, but I ate many a Granny Smith and Macintosh. Apples were a constant in the house, but I had no strong feelings about them.

With my own kids, I usually bought Pink Lady and Gala (what was I thinking?), but it still was not something I thought much about. When the kids got older, I didn’t have many apples in the house at all. I really didn’t eat enough produce for a long time, actually.

And then, 3 years ago, after my bout with breast cancer, I vowed to eat more produce and found myself perusing apple varieties in the store. I had never had a Macoun apple, and bought a few. When I bit into my first one, I realized I was eating something kind of magnificent. I wrote on Facebook that I had just eaten something crazy delicious, ans learned I had a friend who disliked apples—except Macoun. And other people threw out a couple of other apple names for me to try given that I loved Macoun.

I loved that apple so much that I read about the variety, which is only available for a few weeks each year. And shortly thereafter, my Macoun was gone from the shelves of Shop-Rite. But there was Empire (amazing) and Stayman (more amazing) and Macintosh (tasty, but way too mushy). Pink Lady was always good, save one bad batch I got at Whole Foods in which not one single apple was not bitter. That has never recurred, and Pink Lady remains the apple I recommend to everyone. Opal is magnificent, and Kiku is wonderful as long as it is hard enough; it also gets mushy fast.

Piñata gives me joy. SweeTango is close to perfect. If there are mediocre brands at the grocery, I can usually find bagged little Snapdragons to tide me over. My tried and true, Jazz, which is less sweet than many others but has the crunch I crave and stays hard in the fridge for weeks, was one of the finds of my life. Sugar Bee drips with juice and literally tastes like sugar water. It is like having a drink. Tonight, I ate a huge Pazazz and thought maybe I had a new favorite.

To me, this is the taste of fall, and the rest of the year, too, with fall giving a greater selection and the opportunity for some of the really delicious apples, like Macoun, for a few weeks. And it reminds us, and maybe we do need to be reminded, that some things are worth waiting for and cannot be provided on demand like Game of Thrones’ fourth season (and a damn fine season it was, too). Sometimes you just have to wait.

Buy your apples hard, as hard as you can find them. A soft apple is no fun for anyone. At that point, it’s almost ready to be cooked into applesauce.

Please do not ask me where I stand on Honeycrisp or Fuji. I know everyone loves them. Everyone except me. I have had exactly one delicious Fuji in my life after about 25 really uninteresting ones, and those odds are not good. Honeycrisp, well, I don’t love them. I have tried. I have bought them in numerous places, expecting that feeling that everyone else gets. I have tried to force myself to love that apple. But I don’t. It has a texture I can’t stand. I don’t find the taste appealing. However, Pazazz, Sugar Bee, and SweeTango all were developed from Honeycrisp, and I love those apples. I can’t explain. But if you love them, eat them! And try a new brand every now and again because I guarantee that if you branch out a bit, you will find others you love, too (seriously, SweeTango is sick).

Love to all.

There’s this long-running column in newspapers and online called “Hints from Heloise” and it’s filled with all these household tips like how to get the most out of your laundry detergent or the best way to organize coupons or get crayon off the walls. Readers write in with their own tips, which make up a good portion of the column.

Typically, the reader-submitted hints are pretty terrible. My ex-husband, who doesn’t react to much and more than once I considered putting a mirror under his nose to ensure he was still breathing, audibly gasped at the submitted hint by a reader who made a list of everyone in the family’s blood type and medical issues and then laminated it and taped it to the glove compartment door in case they were in an accident. Easily available to the paramedics, and I guess you could wipe fluids off because it was laminated. All very practical and very, very morbid.

The original Heloise no longer writes the column; her daughter does. But it’s the same format as always. Because I live my life differently than most others, I’d like to write my own little hints column.

Bored? Lonely? Well, here’s my tip for you.

If you find yourself bored and feeling quite alone, it is my expert opinion that adopting a puppy, particularly one that is going to grow up to be huge, will alleviate your boredom and loneliness. As you can see, my puppy Calvin keeps me very occupied. Instead of regularly peeing on the pee pee pads I got him, he shreds them and distributes them around the house. This is particularly nasty if he already has peed on them, which is the case in this photo. I no longer have any potholders because he has chewed up every last one of them. There is quite a bit of potholder stuffing in my living room as I write this. And if I am bored, I can always vacuum and then go to Target and buy myself some brand new and stylish potholders.

I’m also occupied doing laundry because Calvin manages to pull down every towel from the towel bar, my bathrobe from the hook, my dishtowels from the oven handle, and my pillows off the sofa and bed. He and Friedrich have lots of tug-of-war toys, but they seem to prefer to use buy socks and underwear for tug of war. Now I have aeration holes in my underwear.

Dogs are very thoughtful.

And, I pick up quite a bit of doody. Steam cleaners are your friend when you have a puppy who poops more often than Bill Barr is likely to. We go on lots and lots of walkies, Calvin and me.

So I’m not lonely and I’ll never, ever be bored again! Get your own large breed puppy soon so you can be as fulfilled and occupied as I am.

Fruit flies in your kitchen? Fuck that.

I recently found myself the recipient of a fruit fly problem after a couple of bananas went soft on my counter. As you might know, once you have fruit flies, it’s kind of a pain to get rid of them. They are everywhere and quite disgusting.

Well, sometimes you get lucky but don’t recognize it right away. Right around the same time, I dropped the cap to my soy sauce. It fell on the kitchen floor and I looked all over for it, but I never saw it again. (Calvin probably ate it.) I shoved the soy sauce to the side and forgot about it (it is not a mystery that I got fruit flies, I guess, given behavior like this) for a few days, and when I saw it and went to pour it down the drain to recycle the bottle, I saw…dead fruit flies floating at the top of the soy sauce. Quite a few, in face.

The fruit flies must have flown down into the bottle and then not have been able to get out given the plastic divider thing at the top that prevents the soy cause from gushing out.

So I did not throw out my soy sauce; I kept it on the counter as a fruit fly trap, and right now it’s like a little fruit fly graveyard with all these dead bodies floating in the brown liquid. I will throw it away someday. Just not now.

Housebound with my daughter for the past 9 days during pandemic shelter in place days, and while flicking around on the remote we stopped to watch the hawking of hand-painted leather purses for $199.99 on the Home Shopping Netwirk.

In case any of you out there decide to douche at midnight during a blackout, I have got the product for you.

This is what you buy when you are detoxing off one of your antidepressants and are waiting for the doc to refill and you haven’t much to do at your new job and are feeling a bit like a useless appendage.

At home there are two dogs wrecking the house, aided and abetted by one five-month-old kitten to whom you are highly allergic but saved from a hoarding situation and have so far gotten her every shot imaginable and had her treated for fleas, extreme underweight, and an upper respiratory infection. There is a nice home waiting for her once she is cured of all her illnesses.

You survive the dander by hanging out in your room and not letting the pets in while they wreck the house on the other side of the door.

In two days is the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur and while you walk a fine line between Judaism and Catholicism, this is a day you take seriously. And you hope your saving this little baby will somehow convince God to give you a pass for your errors and trespasses of the past year, of which there were a few.

And if you remember, you will say a prayer for all those who broke your heart by not accepting you for who you are and not recognizing that that is what you tried to do for them, grouchy days, sorrowful days, flaws and all. But then you have to send them on their way.  Because they won’t ever get it and it is not your charge to make them.

And there are Serenity Slurpees (Coke!) to savor, and scrawny kittens to rescue and cuddle, and prescriptions to be filled, and though it is hard to be misunderstood, you will fly far from the burning bridge visible from your rear view window, and you will ask God for a fresh start.

So, I just read this article that sums up some of what I have been feeling as someone who has “beaten” cancer. (I often feel as if cancer has beaten me, like with a stick, even though I was only Stage 1 and have been told I am free of cancer now.)

You’re left with fear, your single focus of fighting cancer and having doctor upon doctor helping you achieve that goal finishes and then you have to go back to ordinary life, but you are different and so is your life. Someone wrote this in HuffPost, and I hope some can relate.

I realize I started this blog out to be funny. And then life happened, and some things are funny. But some are not.

Love to all.

Here is the LINK to the Huffington Post article.