The day before I left for vacation, my landlord (and Jane hiswife) came traipsing up to my back door with a big, heavy grocery bag. They live next door, but not a close next door, so it's something of a small hike for them to come visiting. Even though I've never had any reason to fear a visit from the landlord, I do, just a little. I can never know if this is the time he's going to evict me.

This time they came not to kick me out but to give me plums. They have a plum tree in their yard, and all of their Santa Rosa plums got ripe at the same time, to the point that the branches were swaying perilously close to the ground. "Do you like plums?" he asked. Well, yes I do. So with one day left before I was going to be gone for a week, I found myself holding a twelve-pound bag (estimated) of ripe plums.

It was actually my intention to take most of them with me, but I forgot. It might be just as well, because it was so hot on the ride north to the lake that next day that ripe might have turned to really, really ripe. I gave a bunch of them to Mom, and a bunch more to Tammy and David, but I still had a lot left. And they were still in my refrigerator when I got home. Still ripe. And I'm still eating them.

Plums, Gala apples, red potatoes, raw carrots. That's the good part of my diet this last week. The rest is junk. For some reason I couldn't resist buying a bag of Lay's Chicago Steakhouse Loaded Baked Potato flavored potato chips. They're gone, but I still have plums. Ice cream sandwiches, chocolate chip cookies, chewy granola bars. They come, they go, but the plums go on and on.

And yet, when I weighed myself (against my better judgment) last Friday, I was at the same weight as before I left on vacation. I expected much worse, and unfortunately the "good" news didn't scare me into looking after myself the way bad news would have. I should have thought I dodged a bullet, and then gone back to healthier eating. Instead I took it as a free pass to eat whatever.

But there's a new week coming up, and I'll use any excuse to make resolutions. I have no reservations about making resolutions, and I usually keep them for a while. I think it's better than giving up, but probably not much better. So anyway, this week: more plums, fewer chips. In fact: no chips. I think I can stick to that one, at least.

If I were trying to pretend I've been exercising regularly, you'd only have to look around my living room to discover the ugly truth. The cobwebs on the exercise bike are prodigious. Whatever spider is working over that territory could probably swallow a plum whole.

Still, it's better than it was before I left. A couple of days before vacation, I finally removed the heavy winter coat that's been hanging off the handlebars of the stationary bicycle. Obviously, with the heat we've had, that coat hasn't been used in a while and should have been retired to the closet months ago. Anyone who dropped by might have noticed it and realized it was out of place. I just let it slide until I was struck by the cleaning-frenzy mode (which didn't last long, and never does).