I am so glad that I stayed home today and cleaned house instead of going out into that insanity that is called “Black Friday.”  I heard on the news that in New York there was a crowd of shoppers so eager to get into their Wal-Mart that they broke down the doors and stampeded over a Wal-Mart employee, who was trampled to death by the crowd!  That is absolutely crazy and stupid, and I think that this is a very good reason to stop holding “Black Friday” sales in the future.  There really is no need of this insanity!  Stores can hold good sales without all of this craziness going on, for crying out loud!  There has got to be a better way!

I read on the news today from Amnesty International’s website that Iran has announced that it will stop executing children.  That kind of surprised me because I did not realize that Iran executed children the first place!  The article continues to explain that this may not apply to children who are convicted of murder, but that in most cases where a child has already been sentenced to execution their sentences will be commuted to life in prison instead.

I don’t know what other crimes a child would have/could have committed to get a death sentence other than murder!  I have to say that the customs of other countries when it comes to legal issues sometimes really amaze me!

I’ve been invited out to a friends house for Thanksgiving this year.  I’m very grateful for the invitation; I’ve had a hectic autumn and it looks like a hectic winter is approaching, so not having to clean and cook and entertain at my house this year is a blessing!  The only drawback is that I won’t have as much leftover turkey as I like to have for leftover meals.  So I guess I’ll be buying a turkey breast anyway and cooking it up here at home so we can have leftover turkey no matter what.  I’ll be making a cranberry-orange-apple relish dish to take with me to the dinner to share with the other guests.  It’s a recipe I’ve had for about four years now, and I like it a lot.  I hope the other guests will like it too!

One of my favorite treats is lemon flavored cookies.  In fact, I love lemon pie, lemon cake, lemon just about anything!  I’ve been having a hard time finding my favorite lemon flavored cookies at the store lately.  It’s very frustrating to have a favorite food and then suddenly not be able to find it anymore!  My favorite lemon cookies are sandwich cookies that are plain shortbread cookies on the outside with a lemon flavored cream filling.  There are other lemon flavored cookies on the market, but those are my favorite. 

For about the past three or four months the store was selling them on the endcaps of the aisle, and now the endcap has something different on it.  Looking in the regular cookie aisle, I can’t find them anywhere.  So I had to settle for lemon flavored wafer cookies, which are good, but not as good as the lemon sandwich cookies.  I suspect that it will be a while (probably next summer) before my favorites reappear!  It’s probably a seasonal item.

I was amazed at how many people came knocking at our door today to encourage us to go vote (of course for THEIR candidate) and how many people came knocking at our door, offering us a ride to the polls, and how many phone calls we got today with the same objectives in mind.  I am so very glad that the polls are now closed and the door knocking and phone calls have stopped.  I voted today, and I hope you did too!  Now we wait to see who the winner is.  I hope that the results will be met with good sportsmanship and dignity by the candidates and the voters alike.