hrj

I succeeded in putting off mowing the lawn until too late to get it in this weekend. Putting it off on Saturday was easy enough since I spent it at Mists Investiture. (Hot, but not too hot. Mostly just hanging out. Great feast.) This morning I had breakfast at Sweet Adeline (if you can call rhubarb cobbler and coffee "breakfast" -- I know I can) then went over the hill for shopping.

If you recall, back in January I picked up the Leopard operating system upgrade for my Macs, and in March I did a preparatory complete back-up and officially put the upgrade on my to-do list, but then decided to wait until I'd finished my taxes. (Of course, now the backup will need to be repeated.) Having done some further research and discovered which of my current programs aren't supported under Leopard (i.e., all the Classic OS programs), I decided I needed to deal with that before doing the upgrade. The major issues boil down to buying MacLink so that I'll still have access to all my WordPerfect files, and getting the current version of Dreamweaver (since I haven't upgraded since version 4, which means buying it from scratch -- but then, I couldn't have upgraded anyway since I'd gotten my original copy under an educational discount for which I'm no longer eligible). The only other programs I'll be losing access to are a couple of language utilities and, more painfully, Quark -- which I'd meant to master to at least a useable level on some project or other. I'm now two versions behind the curve, so I'm not sure how much it would take to upgrade and I should probably not do it unless and until I have a specific project I'm definitely going to use it for. *sigh* But at any rate, my first shopping stop was Fry's in Concord to buy software.

Being on that side of the hills, I stopped by the the shop where I've been buying my china pattern lately and picked up a covered casserole dish. The mall was celebrating some sort of doggie street fair. A pity not all the attending dog owners felt it was necessary to clean up after their little darlings in the mall walkways, however I did my good deed for the day. Back over the hills and on to the week's produce shopping at Berkeley Bowl. My timing was perfect for the setting out of the discount produce bags, which is always an easy way to get inspired, although it means doing some immediate processing to arrest deterioration. So when I got home, I prepped up some slightly bruised eggplant, tomato, and pepper into a casserole (have to break in the new china, after all), peeled and parboiled a couple pounds of pearl onions, and shelled a couple pounds of fresh chickpeas, which are my New Produce Item for the week. I have, of course, prepared chickpeas before, but never fresh. Having spent about 40 minutes shelling them, I'm not at all certain it's an efficient foodstuff to prepare. But they, too, are now parboiled and waiting in the fridge for further inspiration. To go with the eggplant casserole, I popped a rack of lamb into the oven (crusted with mint, basil, and coarse salt).

At this point,

cryptocosm dropped by post-heralds meeting to raid the library and brainstorm on peerage ceremony preparations, so since I'd happened to be preparing multi-serving dishes for dinner anyway, I set two places. There was still a couple hours of daylight when he left, but I managed to fritter it away until too late to be worth getting the mower out. You see how talented I am?