Tulip Immersion

It's early April and everything is still cold and brown here. It's so depressing. It's driving me to keep buying those Stop & Shop flowers - moving on to the potted tulips, this week - while I wait for the real thing, outside.

Dinner Rolls and Fish

I'm going to step myself back 2 weeks to what was quite possibly my favorite activity in San Juan: feeding fish stale (and out-of-focus, here, sorry) bread from the small pier at the hotel.


The rocks underneath formed the perfect parking spot for hundreds of the scroungers, who went nuts for old dinner rolls and English muffins.

Wax (not plastic) flowers

Silly impulse purchase at Stop & Shop for a lush-looking $4 bouquet of fuchsia wax flowers, which I discovered had shed all their blossoms by checkout time, and then littered themselves all over the kitchen, including the sink drain.


No matter. The blossoms lived quite happily, face up into several bowls of water for much longer than the bouquet itself, in this stolen Denny's carafe (it's a remnant from Josh's youth, I know...stealing is wrong).


(good thing proper sentence syntax isn't being graded)

Stuff on Saru

Bad things happen to those who fall asleep on the couch, as inspired by stuffonmycat.com.



Speaking of which, here's something on Lizzy:

Fantasia-esqe Flowers

This spot - the fantastic contrast of the flowers and blue tiles in a fountain, also taken in old San Juan, was one of those things that could so easily have been missed, if I hadn't wandered into the right garden alley, on the tail of the right pigeon, or whatever it was that led me to the spot. I got the feeling that think Josh didn't even see what I was staring at, despite standing no more than 3 feet from me when I took the photo, based on his, "hey, what's that?" when it showed up as the desktop image at home last week.



(The Fantasia reference is to the Disney movie, not the American Idol)

Shirt Shopping with Vikram

Yes, there was another very similar red shirt in the store. No, it wasn't exactly identical.

Wanting to be helpful, he offers to change out the mannequin in the display window himself.

The process took...a bit longer than you'd think.

(10 minutes later) Oh, look, the mannequin's top comes off. Hmm.

Pigeons of Old San Juan

Can you find them all? (yeah ok, the first one is easy)

La Bombanero

We're just back from tagging along on the Kumar family vacation to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The 85 degree weather + trade wind combo was a nice break from March in Boston, though returning to a snowstorm was a bit of a shock.

The average weight gain for the group in this week was 4 lbs/person. Aside from all the tasty lard-fried snacks, here's another clue as to how this happened: La Bombanero, a breakfast spot in old San Juan, a window full of pastries -


- and a favorite menu item: the mallorca sandwich - a sweet roll with cheese and ham or bacon, grilled in a press with butter and covered in a cloud of powdered sugar:

Yum!

Snow Squall

What a strange phenomenon. This mini-blizzard could almost have gone unnoticed if it weren't for the noise of the broken screen door flapping around last night. Silly artic blast.

Josh turns 30

Josh has finally caught up to me (once you turn 30, it's just the decade that counts, not the year, right?) . I'm not good with gifts or surprises, so it was nothing short of a miracle that I was able to get this gift, a large chair into the house unnoticed and intact (with help, that is) - as long as you don't count the screen door broken down on it's way in. Anyhow, for those who asked to see pictures, here one is, on it's inaugural use.