Today is Sunday, November 4 and there are only seven days until my birthday. I’m just saying.  Today we remember the birthdays of Eden Phillpotts, Walter Cronkite and Noam Pitlik. On this day in 1842 Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd in Springfield, IL, in 1924 Nellie Tayloe Ross was elected the first US female governor, in Wyoming, and in 1980 Ronald Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter by a landslide. In Italy it is Unity Day, in Panama it is Flag Day, in Tonga it is Constitution Day and in the US it is National Candy Day.

Since it is November, here is some information on the month. November is the eleventh and penultimate month of the year and the fourth and last of four months to have a length of 30 days. November was the ninth month of the ancient Roman calendar. November retained its name (from the Latin novem meaning "nine") when January and February were added to the Roman calendar. The birthstones are topaz and citrine and the flower is the chrysanthemum. November is National Diabetes Month, National Family Caregivers Month, Banana Pudding Lovers Month and National Peanut Butter Lovers Month, to name just some of the monthly observances. That should cover your need for November trivia.  Let’s close that file so we can move on.

Once a year, time goes backward. That time came this morning at 2 a.m., when we “fell back” and set our watches an hour earlier to 1 a.m. The occasion marks the annual transition from daylight saving time to standard time. There are a number of reasons why people dislike this time of year – mainly, earlier sunsets. My problem is that, as an owner of a large number of watches, it is going to take me a rather long time to reset them all. Credit — or blame — for the biannual shift goes back to Benjamin Franklin, who published An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light in a 1784 journal after he noticed that people burned candles at night but slept past dawn, but he never saw his plan put into action. 

The U.S. first implemented daylight saving during World War I as a way to conserve fuel. There are proponents of going to Daylight Saving Time and staying there and there are those who feel we should just stay with Standard Time. This is a discussion that has been going on for years and will probably go on for years. Like it or not, we are stuck with it for now. So, we have fallen back and will not spring forward until March. If you like standard time, enjoy the months that you have. If you like daylight saving time, you only have to wait five months and it will be back.

Recently, Barbara and I went shopping at one of those large discount grocery (and everything else) stores. We purchased a number of items, loaded them into the car and came home. We unloaded everything, brought it all into the house and put it away. No problem! That night, as we were getting ready to go to bed, I asked her if she had put away the box of K cups we bought. She said no, she thought I had. I said I didn’t think so and went to check. In fact they were not where we would normally store them. 

She wondered if we had left them in the car so, at 11:30 PM, I went out to the car to see if they were there. I even took a flashlight on the theory that the light in the car would not be sufficient for me to see a red box large enough to hold 60 K cups. They were not in the car. I came back in the house and we began searching for where we might have put them. You know how it is. You are in the process of putting things away and carry something with you and then put it down, not meaning to leave it there, but forgetting to pick it up. I even went back out to the car to see if the box had fallen and I didn’t see it.

She said she knew they were not in the cart when she returned it to the cart corral, because she checked. I wondered if I had left it by the car when I was unloading and someone came along and took it. I had some less than pleasant things to say about whoever would have done that. I even checked to see if it had been put in the freezer; however, Barbara scoffed at me for that, pointing out that there would not have been enough room for it there. I said that I remembered carrying several things into the house and I even mentioned what each of the items was. We went through the event of unloading and carrying, each time ending with my giving the inventory of what I carried. I remembered giving the items to Barbara, but she did not remember having the K cups.

It was closing in on midnight and we had looked everywhere several times. I even made another trip to the car, thinking maybe they had somehow shifted from the back of the car to the back seat. They had not. I also took one more look under the car, but they had not magically appeared or been returned by contrite neighbors. As I was walking back into the house, I ran the event through my head and realized that the item I thought was the box was actually something else. 

At this point, Barbara suggested that I check the receipt. I did and discovered that they had not charged us for the coffee. Apparently they did not see it on the counter. We did not notice that they were not in the cart, nor did we notice that we did not put them in the car. It was not until I checked the receipt that we realized that we never had them. Now you have some idea of the things you can look forward to as you get older.

This week our fact tells us that no one may catch fish with his or her bare hands in Kansas. I am not sure if this is a law or if it is because fish are just too hard to catch by hand and the ones in Kansas are particularly slippery. I will have to check on that.