Friday, March 6, 2009

The Cake Plate

A local community college's (Fullerton College for you SoCal'ers) school of horticulture hosts an annual 3 day tomato plant sale every March...and I wait all year long for it.

It's actually the 1st time in 3 years that I have been able to go and I am so happy right now...cuz tomato plants really rock my boat.

=0)

I picked up 12 different varieties, 19 plants total and got educated in things like indeterminate and determinate and growing in chicken manure.  

I am going to rent a rototiller next week and rototill a big section of my garden that needs to be, well, rototilled.  

I am thinking I should charge admission to watch that one.

=0)

I've got my chicken manure and gypsum and compost...started my seeds, got my tomatoes and am ready to go.  

Shine, sun, shine.

Ran most of my errands today...I've heard that guy that I like so much will be arriving back in town sometime tomorrow, so I hit Claros's and TJ's (and if anyone finds arborio rice at TJ's...can you pick up a few boxes for me???  Ours no longer has it...) and Peet's and the dry cleaners and the bank.

Which, speaking of the bank, I am loving, loving, loving M's new pay schedule.  For the last 13 years he has been payed only once a month and it was so hard to budget...he's getting payed twice a month now and while it is the same amount, it is so much easier to budget.

Problem is I had all my bills on autopay for the 15th and wanted to spread things out...and had to go into the bank to do that.

Easy, peasy, pumpkin pie.  Or, in the case of our bank, free cookies.

=0)

Came home, ate lunch and then walked to the front of the school to pick up Brian...they sell Juice It Up smoothies on Friday's afterschool (so much better than ice cream!) and I got there early before the line got really long.

And got to see my book-fair-partner-in-crime Suzie...who is rather like Mary Poppins in my book.  She's got it all together.

=0)
And for Suzie...this is the top of the cake plate.  The cool thing about it is the story....we had a friend named Michael, who left a high powered corporate job and came to Concordia to study under my Michael.

He was older than us, married, two beautiful kids...the kind of guy who when you talked to him really listened.

One night over dinner, I was telling him about my Grandmother's house and these plates that she had hanging on her wall.  They had raised pink flowers and green leaves and when I was little, I thought they looked like they had tunafish on them.  

Who knows why...I was little.

=0)

Anyway, I told him that I loved those plates.

It was just one of many conversations we had over many bottles of wine in our beautiful backyard...and a few weeks later, he showed up at our house with a big box.

In it was this cake plate...with raised pink and green flowers:
He saw it in a store and bought it for me...the tunafish cake plate.

=0)

I cried and cried...but it was just the way he was.  To everyone.

Michael died a few years ago and is now soaring (and singing with his manly man voice!) with the angels...and everytime I look at my cake plate, I think about him.  

He made the world a better place.

=0)




1 comment:

  1. Hi M! What a great story about the cake plate...I love it! I got such a kick out of being on your blog and love reading about your sweet, sweet family and great food. Love you!!!

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...