Not a food-related post today, but just a nice reminder from our trip that sometimes you get to see the fruits of your labors in a surprising and gratifying way. These two trees are in the front of our old house in Northern Virginia where we lived from 1994-2009. We planted them when Gideon was a baby/toddler–I think he may have been a year and a half old. I remember that we did some gardening in the front yard with him sitting out there in his playpen with us. Jim and I pondered and pondered about what trees to choose and decided on the contrast of the Japanese red maple with the Kousa dogwood. The photograph doesn’t do the dogwood justice; it was covered with blooms. Kousas are so much nicer than the regular dogwoods as they bloom quite a bit later and their blossoms are longer-lasting than the regular ones. I keep saying that I want to plant one here, as they are hardy to zone 4. Since they bloom later in the season they are less likely than the earlier-flowering ones to have their buds killed by a freeze. Seeing the spectacular results of our efforts over two decades ago is a nice spur for me to get going on planting one now. They take awhile to get going, and we aren’t necessarily going to be at this house for 20 more years! Maybe I’d better go over to the garden center today and see if they have any in stock.
Is there a project you need to start so that you can see the results down the road?
Didja read 
Here it is: stay slender. That’s it. (Assuming that you’re not doing so by smoking or taking diet pills or starving yourself. Notice that it says “slender,” not “skeletal.”)
There I was, driving to the church for the Cherry Creek Chorale’s Christmas Concert (that’s five C’s, folks) on Friday afternoon, kind of thinking that it had been really fun to work on all this great music, and couldn’t we just leave it at that? Did we really have to go ahead and do the performance?
As an example of this moderate approach I give you our kitchen cabinets. They are high quality, with sturdy drawers and doors, soft-close hinges (which make a surprising difference in how I shut them), and solid-wood fronts with a beautiful factory finish. They are miles removed from the cabinets I made do with in my much bigger and more expensively-countered kitchen in our old house. And they cost about half of what we would have spent for the ones you order and then have to wait weeks for.
I have a book post to write later today, but for some reason this phrase has popped into my mind recently. It’s from a TV show of several years back called Leverage, and we really enjoyed it for awhile until the writing got so bad that we couldn’t stand it any more and stopped watching. But, in spite of all those flaws, it had some memorable characters, among them an ex-mercenary soldier kinda guy named Eliot Spencer who had a lot of facets to him. In one episode the team has infiltrated a wedding that involves some crime figures, and the soldier guy is acting as the catering chef, primarily because he can cook. He gets really into the whole thing, almost forgetting why the team is there in the first place. People are coming and the food isn’t ready! It’s more stressful than a hit job. I actually looked up the quotation above; it’s what he says to another team member when she’s trying to get him to leave the kitchen and get on with their investigation. (Season 1, Episode 7: “The Wedding Job.”)
If you’re like me you’ve spent the last several weeks reading and watching everything you can about Harvey and Irma, those two most unwelcome visitors to our shores. I feel especially sorry for those who were just starting to crawl out from under the rubble left by Harvey, only to have the nation’s attention diverted to Florida’s woes. As I sit here, safe and dry, it’s easy for me to do a little pontificating about what these storms reveal about the human condition. To be honest, I’m finding it quite difficult to write
I meant to write about the film “Dunkirk” last week but it never happened. There are still plenty of showings in my area, so I think it’ll be going for awhile yet. We went weekend before last and didn’t realize until we were told the price of our tickets that we had chosen an IMAX showing, but I think in this instance it was well worth the money. This is a movie about a huge subject, so a huge screen seems appropriate. Even if you don’t normally shell out for movie tickets, preferring to wait until you can