Columbus Day is coming up. The local paper and the shoppers are all touting various “get out and go somewhere” things. And one of them is a foodfest. I have learned, over the years, to stay away from any activity with "fest" tacked onto it.

Every year, in New York City, there was (maybe still is) something called “The Ninth Avenue Food Festival,” in the area just below Central Park on the West Side. It is a neighborhood that is old apartment buildings with small shops at street level, with merchandise displayed outside (making the walking very narrow indeed) but very appealing if you like ethnicity.

The traffic was blocked off and there were food vendors in the middle of the roadway, all cooking foods from every culture and all using charcoal burners. You couldn’t breathe. I realized right away that this wasn’t for me. I need to know when to stop, so I prefer a meal with a beginning, middle and end. Free-form eating is the road to ruin. Also I like to breathe.

Jay and I spent about 20 minutes not inhaling, and when we got to 57th St., made a sharp turn toward 7th Avenue, where we found a lovely Greek-Mediterranean restaurant with a bar, Piraeus, I think it was, and had martinis to get the charcoal out of our throats, and saganaki and other delicacies. :)

There is an Oktoberfest coming up here at the local German Club, but I have heard their version of German cooking is not good, so we don’t go. I like a good knackwurst now and then with imported beer that is full of flavor, so we’ll go into Fort Myers for real German food.

Our Sears repair guy came today to work on our refrigerator. He always runs 2 – 3 hours late and that is compounded by the parameters of the visit –We are told “between 8 and 12” and 12:30 rolls around and we get a call that he is running “late” and he shows up around 3, so that is a day of waiting and being unable to do anything outside. I am hoping that he showed Ed how to replace the water filter cartridge. We haven’t been doing that right, so the water wasn’t getting filtered. Maybe I can go back to using tap water.

The other issue is I don’t like cloudy ice cubes but, after Googling the subject, I came to realize that it is too involved to use distilled water (that anyway, I’d have to buy), boil it , pour it into ice trays (that I’d have to buy), start the water cooling in the refrigerator, then transfer it to the freezer the next day. Oh, please. I will continue to buy bagged ice for parties. Wilfredo, the repair guy, said the cloudiness is caused by impurities and minerals in the tap water. Whoever invents a quick and easy way to get clear cubes at home without all the bother will make a fortune. And the joy of having an “ice cube maker” in the door of the refrigerator is for convenience, so who wants to return to using ice trays?

xx, Teal