You can and should eat only so much. And sometimes when we're food shopping we get a little exuberant at the choices available to us, particularly the vast displays of fresh fruits and vegetables in season, locally accessed and we may tend to overstock our pantries and refrigerators. It's not only our weekly food shopping that we do together, but Irving loves to drop in to various grocery stores and their choices too kind of wow him. Invariably he brings home more food to supplement what we already have, but it's not supplement that we need, since I'm able to assess what we'll need for a week.

So he will bring home more food that we really didn't need, but he's pleased about his acumen in selections, and we end up eating everything one way or another. I do, at any rate. His appetite isn't as large as mine, I swear, and he tends to eat more sparingly than I do. Which means sometimes I have to wrack my brain about what to do with food that is past its prime. Like the big tub of cream cheese he bought awhile ago, though we already had cream cheese in the refrigerator.

He always emphasizes what a good price it was, and it does no good to respond that the price is irrelevant if the product isn't used. We also had too much in the way of fresh fruit. So I paired the cream cheese with blueberries to bake cheese tarts topped with blueberries for dessert today. We both look forward to baked desserts on Friday evening. Into the cream cheese filling went some sour cream and we had too much of it too, since he bought an extra tub 'on sale'.

That worked out very nicely. I just lined large muffin tins with cupcake papers, made a pastry dough, cut it into rounds, fitted them into the papers, made the filling, baked the tarts, and prepared a blueberry garnish with sugar, cranberry juice, cornstarch, a half-pint of fresh berries and a bit of almond essence and butter. I get a sense of accomplishment out of that, and we both enjoy a good dessert. Irving's praise is worth the bother; no bother at all.

Everything in the outdoors was well and truly drenched this morning after overnight rain following hard on yesterday afternoon's heavy rain that erupted after we'd had our early afternoon romp with Jackie and Jillie through the forest trails in a light drizzle. We'd had a two-day 'drought' this week when the garden and the garden pots so accustomed to daily downpours sulked at the lack of rain. Now they've no need to.

When we left for the ravine with our puppies the atmosphere was one of deep humidity although the temperature gauge read only 19C. The sky was crowded with dark grey clouds and there was the smell and look of imminent rain. In the forest it was so dark my little camera balked at taking photographs. But the rain held off as we toddled along, enjoying the walk-through, but very conscious of a late-summer aura shifting into fall mode.