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Happy Easter everyone! 

Her name is Larry.  Bet that was keeping you up at night wondering what the heck it was.  What could a feminine Larry be a derivation of? 

This post will be short and sweet – having one of those days where I am in meetings from the minute I get up until, well 3:00pm.  Then I have to get some kind of plan in place for dinner. 

Whatever dinner is it will involve lemons because my Dad’s tree is going nuts.  It bears the best lemons I’ve ever tasted and it does so, quite prolifically, for most of the year.

I’ve been on a lemon kick because one of the message boards I frequent (moderate actually) has had a lively topic about Limoncella going for a week now.  My mouth waters just thinking about sipping an icy cold Limoncella on a hot afternoon.   Or making a Limoncella spritzer with sparkling water and lots of ice cubes.  Mmmm.

The message board has nothing to do with food, or drinking – it’s actually about makeup and skincare (a wee obsession of mine).  The women that post on it are a fun and lively group and most of us have been posting for years and years.  I never have advertised my blog on the board and up until now I’ve only told one person on the board about it.  It’s not a big secret or anything, it’s just not something I thought was appropriate to promote there. 

Well you can imagine how funny it was that someone from the board discovered my blog serendipitously by following a link on another crafy/decorating type blog.  She left a comment down below that described how she finally put two and two together and figured out who I was.   I think it was the butterfly phobia that finally tipped her off.  I mean how many people will actually confess to that?

There’s no point to this, really – I just got a kick out of it.  And what a small world we are, when you think about it.

And this wasn’t short and sweet, was it?  Maybe next time.

The weather right now is just perfect.  The days (up in Granite Bay) are in the 70’s and the sun shines from the minute you get up until the shadows lengthen and fade.   In another month it will be in 90’s – just you watch.  And there goes my water bill. 

I have to walk down to the end our little lane to get our mail.  We have new neighbors that just bought a house on our street and it’s fun to walk past and see the progress they are making.  The house they bought was probably built in the 60’s or 70’s and, typical to our street, is a little hybrid cottage/ranch style home.  The couple that bought it are young and energetic.  A lot of clearing and painting so far.

Our mailbox is at the very end of the row and it has a bullet hole in the door.  Rick frets about it during the rainy months but I kind of like it.  Adds a certain rustic charm to the mailbox, if you ask me. 

When I walked down here this afternoon I passed our neighbor who was coming back from getting her mail.  For the life of me I can never remember her name.  She is an older woman, probably in her late 70’s or early 80’s and she has a man’s name.  A really masculine man’s name – not like Bobbi or Chris – it’s Howard or Ralph or something like that.  She lives in a cottage on her son’s property and is really delightful.  She used to be a marine too.  Or an Air Force pilot or something like that.  If I could only remember her name I would strike up a conversation with her – I’m guessing she has some really interesting stories to tell.

These little moments, walking to get the mail or talking over the fence to our neighbors – this is what I’ll miss once we leave this place.  I yearn to be elsewhere, to have a garden that doesn’t need to watered four times a day during the Summer and where my nearest sister isn’t 200 miles away,  but the here and now has some lovely moments too.

And off it goes.  Marie ~  I was a day behind shipping this out but it’s on its way now!  I hope you enjoy it. 

I love wrapping presents.  Well, let me clarify I love the creative side, picking out wrapping, bows and other embellisments but I don’t like the actual part that involves folding precision corners and tape.  I was going for a Kimono type look but then slapped an Easter graphic on top which kind of took it in another direction. 

The labels on the shipping box came from Papaya! She has delicious cards, journals and prints.  I also got the white pen from her.  If you do scrapbooking and want a really opaque white pen this is the best I’ve ever found.  Truth be told I even borrowed the idea for the label placement and curlicues from her.  She is a creative genius. 

This was fun – I’ll have to do it every 100th post.

I’m about ready to commit a crime for an almond croissant.    Seriously.  I would jump someone if they walked by with one. 

Ignore the bunny picture for now.  It’s just there for looks.  And as a reminder of how I am eating lately.

So since Black Friday – when the scales fell from my eyes – I think I’ve lost about 4-5 lbs.  About 10 lbs. down from my heaviest (where when I saw the number on the bathroom scale I quickly looked away and decided there was something dreadfully amiss with the mechanics of said scale).  So all good progress. 

Food is rather boring though and I miss fat (the edible kind) just dreadfully.  So goes the longing for flaky, buttery baked goods.  Mmm.  Instead I chop up vegetables and put them on the prettiest plate I can find and make an event of the thing.

Along with the pretty plate thing other tricks I employ are to make things as spicy as I can stand them and to eat as high a fiber content as possible without turning into a brood mare.  The spicy business is tricky because a lot of spicy foods (even low fat, low sugar ones) are generally very high in sodium and I woke up yesterday morning with elephant eye.  This is where your eyes swell up to alarming proportions while you are sleeping and then deflate, leaving you with baggy, wrinkly elephant eyes upon awakening. 

The plate laden with cucumber and radishes came from a lovely antique shop near me.  A smaller place but one of those ones where there are a number of vendors renting space.  There was a stack of eight of these plates (about the size of a small bread plate) and a price sticker on the top one that said $10.  I brought the stack to the front desk and asked if the $10 was for one plate or the stack.  The cashier had to call the vendor to confirm but it was for the whole stack.  I still feel like I got away with something.  I love to put them out when I serve hors d’oeuvres – they are the perfect size.

They don’t make radishes taste like an almond croissant, however.  Can’t have everything.