Well, it's got to be said, and I'll get it out of the way now so as not to bore you too much with sports talk.

THE RED SOX ARE GOING TO THE WORLD SERIES! I'M SO HAPPY!

Okay, now, that that's been made clear, I can get back to thinking about books and food.

We have house guests arriving this evening--friends we've known since college--and they love good food and always expect me to go all out, so I've been planning tonight's dinner for months. We'll start with cheese and charcuterie. Then we'll move on to Portuguese seafood stew (with littlenecks, mussels, cod, garden tomatoes and peppers, and homemade pot au feu broth), with a salad of rapini and nasturtium leaves (picked before last night's frost) and two kinds of bread: breadsticks with black sesame seeds, and soft dinner rolls with black pepper and winter squash puree. For dessert: a pear and dried cranberry pie, with ginger whipped cream.

It's not exactly a fancy meal, but my goal was to make much of what Portland has to offer seafood- and garden-wise.  Needless to say: I'll be running that new dishwasher a lot today.

I've started re-reading A. S. Byatt's The Children's Hour. I've been writing. Probably I'll need to rip out some frostbitten plants today. My foot is getting better. The washing machine is still making that bad noise. More poems have been accepted for publication. A car-repair guy removed a nail from my tire. This coffee is delicious.