Summertime

Time for the annual summertime web-log sign off for a few weeks. God willing, as people used to say, I’ll return to it around July 15, the unheralded mid-point of summer.

Till then, a few unconnected notes. Not long ago, I interviewed a nationally renowned authority in a subspecies of real estate finance on the phone. He sounded something like Wally Cox, which made the interview slightly more difficult.

Crickets are back and singing by night here in the North. I enjoy cricketsong a good deal, and used to like falling asleep to it in the old house, because they were just outside open windows. In our present house, however, opening the south-facing windows at night – toward the back yard, where they seem to be – also invites noise in from the expressway about a mile away. It’s one of the few things I don’t like about this house.

I saw a couple of fireflies the other day, too. Lilly caught a couple. High summer is nigh.

The price of doughnuts is up at Country Donuts, two locations in the world, with one in Schaumburg, Ill. Now the regular price of a dozen is $5.15, but only a mug pays that, since Country Donuts publishes coupons weekly in local advertising circulars that knock a dollar off the price. So it’s $4.15. Compare this to the cost of a dozen doughnuts in San Antonio in 1969: 99¢. That I remember clearly, because as youngest member of the family I was often sent into the shop to get them.

But that’s in nominal terms. I go to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site, which has a handy inflation calculator, and discover that in today’s dollars, I (or really, my mother) was spending $5.46 back then for after-church doughnuts many Sundays. So the real price of doughnuts, even at full price, is down! Real estate, college tuition, health care – these things outpace inflation. But not doughnuts. Happy news.