Posts Tagged ‘spring’

Speaking of rhubarb

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

If we weren’t, we soon will be. It’s that time of year again.

Last night as I was going to bed I thought, it’s nearly time for our local farmers’ market to start up again. And immediately following that I thought, Rhubarb!

It turns out that farmers’ market opens officially next Saturday. But the very thought got me to write ‘rhubarb’ in soap on the bathroom mirror (how else did I ever remember things pre-Google calendar?) and get The Prof to check the freezer for last year’s rhubarb just in case.

And guess what!

He found a small bag of it, all nice and chopped and just looking like it needed to be in a cake. So today I got ready for this year’s rhubarb by closing out last year’s and making a cake.

Naturally I couldn’t find my recipe (again), so I called my daughter and asked her for it. She said, “It’s on your blog, Mom. That’s where I get it.”

Right. So it is.

I googled it and it came right up. What a good place to store my recipes. Now I’ll be able to find them.

2007 must have been a bumper year for rhubarb.

I see I’ve put up a couple of other recipes using rhubarb as well –including my dear friend Elda’s fabulous rhubarb delight. Every year recently that I made it, I took a piece to Elda who had moved to a nursing home.

This year I can’t because Elda passed away in January, just days after her 92 birthday. But I’ll make it again this year — and every year — in her memory and enjoy it while I remember the warmth of her friendship and the stories that came with it.

So we have cake tonight and I have a chapter of Demetrios tucked away in good shape, and another one coming along, and several more in the pipeline. The weather is good — April showers are making lovely flowers hereabouts.

It’s beginning to look a lot like spring.

ps: those little blue flowers are back, too — a bit later than usual this year.

Happy St David’s Day!

Saturday, February 28th, 2009


If you’re not from Wales, you probably don’t celebrate St David’s Day.

You may not even realize it is St David’s Day. Well, now you do. We have always celebrated it because, well, we have Welsh ancestry and a son named David. It seemed like a good reason every year.

Plus, March 1st means it’s almost spring. The daffodils are — hereabouts at least — not quite poking their heads above ground. But the snow is mostly gone and things are definitely looking up.

Things are brightening up on the home front as well. I have a new best friend — a Fujitsu 510 document feed scanner that swallows 18 pages a minutes (or so it says, and I believe it), reads BOTH SIDES of the document, throws out blank pages and turns the resulting files into searchable .pdfs.

It’s amazing. I don’t know how I lived without out it. Well, yes, I do. I had an office that looked like I papered the floor — five layers deep. And this was AFTER I’d filled sixteen file boxes with paper first.

No more. The paper is dwindling fast. The floor has reappeared. The scanned files are building up in the nice new external hard drive I got to go along with the scanner. They are making my life so much neater, not to mention how much easier it is to find what I’m looking for.

And while I scan, I commune with Demetrios. He looked, at first glance, far too perfect and easy going. I felt like the old lady shouting, “Where’s the beef?” because there didn’t seem to be any conflict. I pointed that out to him. I said, “Anny has problems. You are on top of the world. What’s up with that?”

He didn’t answer for what seemed like weeks. But then the other day while I was scanning, he came in and stared at me and when I stared back, he said, “Shows what you know,” and turned around and left again.

First cross word I’ve had from him. Hmmm. And now it turns out he’s had things going on in his life I knew nothing about. Important things. Life altering things. And everyone knew it — including, it seems, the paparazzi. Everyone but me.

So we’re getting somewhere. He’s talking a bit at last. Thank heavens. We need to get to work here.

I’m reading over Christo in galley form. I hate galleys. I’ve read the book too many times (especially this book) and I have no perspective anymore. I can’t always even see typos, so I have to read it out loud. It’s excruciating.

Meanwhile, Heather is sending me book pages to proofread and get read to link up. She’s got the most current books loaded (the last three), and she promises a vast upload of backlist sometime this week. I’ll be excited to see them again. I hope you’ll check them out, too.

Happy St David’s day! Happy almost spring!