Years ago, I heard a bit on NPR that noted how Lawrence Welk managed to maintain his viewer-ship by keeping his finger firmly on the musical pulse from twenty years previous. They predicted that around the year 1990, we'd hear: "Thank-a you, A thanka you. Tonight our guest is Eric Clapton and his Stratocaster. He'll sing for you a-Sunshine of Your Love with our own Jimmy on the accordion. Hit it boys. An-a-1, an-a 2."

Skating rinks use the same philosophy. When songs get too old to be played in elevators and grocery stores, they get played for skaters.

Before Carol and I got together, I was ice skating pretty seriously. I skated several hours a week and had mastered most of the simple jumps and was even working on a double.

New wife, new jobs, etc, and it's been almost 30 years since I was on the ice.

Skating is supposed to be a very good exercise, particularly for folks in an age where you don't really want to do a lot of pounding on the cartilage.

So, I've started hitting the Veteran's park rink a couple times a week.

I'm not doing any jumps. I'm still remembering the really simple moves and trying to not fall down. But I've gone from skating for a half-hour (with two breaks) and feeling utterly dead, to skating for a full hour and only feeling half-dead.

The rink is practically deserted this time of year, so I don't feel self-conscious when I sing along with stuff like "Sugar Sugar", "Proud Mary" and "California Dreaming".

At least they aren't playing Barry Manilow, so I haven't totally embarrassed myself yet.

The other event this week is that I'm coming to the end of tomato season. I had so many tomatoes I ended up making salsa, pizza sauce, spaghetti sauce, and cacciatore.

Something I should have realized is that tomatoes taste different after you boil them for a while. Using salsa as a pizza sauce works, but boiling it for a while makes a better pizza sauce.

I even invented an air-fried green tomato on pancake with cheese that was actually tasty. Several folks survived trying this.

Fresh, vine ripened tomatoes were one of Carol's favorite foods.

She hated tomatoes when she was growing up. All she ever got were store-bought tomatoes that were picked green and "ripened" (turned red) with ethylene gas.

Her parents decided that liking tomatoes was an adult taste, so each year, on her birthday (at the end of November) she had to taste a tomato to see if she liked them now.

Needless to say, she didn't like what was in the stores in November, and grew to not like her birthday much either.

A few years after we were married, a friend's dad had too many tomatoes, and sent over a basket of vine-ripened, fresh picked tomatoes. This was the first time she understood why people would ever eat tomatoes.

This didn't change Carol's opinion of store-bought tomatoes, but the years I grew tomatoes, we ate lots of BLT's and such. This is the first year I've had so many tomatoes (from just three bushes) that I had to resort to making sauce just to get them off my counter.