Rain or shine (and some years, honestly, it's been very rainy), you just have to go to the Jimmy Fund Scooperbowl at Government Center at least once each year. Miriam, Sean, and Sarah joined us this year, and we all ate until we felt rather ill from the amount of ice cream. Robert holds the cups he and I shared--there were one or two simply terrible flavors (Lobster Tracks, for instance, despite the name, was one flavor no one managed to finish), but we tossed those cups so they wouldn't mess up our data.
Mother's Day and Father's Day were both spent in Boston with Dick and Grandma Helena. On Father's Day, we went to Hawthorne by the Sea, the Anthony's over near Lynn Beach and Popo's Hot Dogs. The food was very good, as always, and Grandma Helena was having such a good time she gave us such gems of quotes as "In my lifetime, we drove the hat companies out of business! And do you know why? Because we enjoy. . . [pregnant pause] not wearing hats!" and, when ordering scrod instead of Robert's choice of flounder, "You get what you want, but I prefer thick fish."
Adventures in Gardening
This year is really the first we have an easy-t0-get-onto roofdeck, complete with a skylight that doesn't leak. At left you see the door into our dining room and the back half of our deck, with storage bins, a table and chairs (the umbrella is lying down--because of the wind, we only put it up when we're using it), and the grill. Behind our building is the old piano factory on Tremont Street, which is now apartments and artist lofts and a theatre, and that's what the giant (now unused) smokestack belongs to. In the center shot, you see the front half of the deck, with stacked chairs and all of our plants, including mint, dill, sage, cilantro, lots of basils, rosemary, lavendar, tarragon, parsley, red-leaf lettuce, soybeans, zucchini, shallots, chives, and lots of heirloom tomatoes. (Note to self: buy new organic pre-fertilized dirt! It really makes a difference--the pot of tomatoes that got the new fancy dirt is now five times bigger and thicker than the pots that got old dirt, probably stripped of the nutrients from being used so many years. Same pots, same plants, same sun--just different dirt.) At right, I zoomed in on the plants at the far front right of the deck so you can see the nice view of the Boston skyline from our roof.
Sarah organized a beach-ball birthday party for Lil Karen--we had a sort of a picnic near the beach (it was cool, windy, and drizzly) on Nantasket/Hull, and we consumed all sorts of ball-shaped foods, while batting around (of course) beach balls). After dinner, we went over to the carousel (supposedly very fast) and the arcade, with a final stop at a Dairy Queen before heading back into Boston. At left, Sarah, Ben, Suzi, and Meghan try to figure out how to pay for the carousel. (Only later did we notice that we'd been conducting our transactions right on top of the prominent "donations" box. . . which Sarah swears she didn't dip into.)
We like picking strawberries. Maybe we got a little carried away, but it was our anniversary weekend, and at $2.50 a pound (not including the two pounds we must have eaten in the field), we still picked 13 pounds of berries. There some are in our fridge, and there more are on a puffed souffle-pancake. Others were consumed plain, dipped in sugar, dipped in chocolate, in yogurt, or in a sabayon. If I get really desperate, I'll make ice cream and jam tomorrow, but we seem to be making a good deal of headway. Strawberry season is so short, and year-round berries are so terribly dry, hard, white, and lacking in flavor that we had to take advantage of it when it's here--besides, did I mention it was our anniversary? (Nine years, baby, nine years. . . )
Brief sidenote here: I generally don't like taking pictures of food when we're out in restaurants, as I find it mildly tacky and disruptive. (I know, I know--everyone else does it, and I'm not condemning them: I just don't like doing it personally.) So there's no picture of our anniversary dinner, but I have to rave here about the wonderful, wonderful food and service at T.W. Food in Cambridge. The cauliflower ice cream, the oyster tasting menu--it was all excellent, and the wine pairings truly made both wine and food more than the sum of their parts. In short: Go there. Eat everything. Be very, very happy!
Yet again, Robert takes a shot of me reluctantly petting a goat in a petting zoo while a random little girl is so eager to pet it that she cannot be moved out of the shot. I do not like petting zoos. This one, at the Franklin Park Zoo a mere 10-minute drive from our house ($11 entry fee, and free parking), was small, not too smelly (it hadn't gotten too hot and sunny yet), and relatively empty (the sheep, for some reason, "aren't coming out today" we were told by the helpful attendant, and I think a lot of parents stayed away so as to keep their children from the inevitable disappointment that a mere two-goat petting zoo would be). The rest of the zoo was fine, really--not too big, with some good unsexy animals, such as the porcupines and the tapirs, who ate very nicely and who (especially in the shadows of the lions and the newly redone gorilla exhibit) were thrilled at some attention from visitors. After the zoo, we headed deeper into Mattapan looking for good barbeque, but the Pit Stop was closed. We went instead to a random Dominican storefront, where after picking out one of this, one of that, a piece of pork, a chicken patty, etc., we managed to run up a tab of a whopping $6.75.
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Created: 6/25/07. Last Modified: 6/25/07.