Giddy as a Fool; Into the Weeds, Steve Jobs and on Being Dumb

Giddy as a Fool Day (13 days after the other Fools’ Day) I’m not ashamed to be included in Fools’ Days……

After spending the better part of the last 4 weeks nursing my daughter through her ankle debacle and taking that opportunity to test a myriad of scone recipes on her, I have happily switched gears to the outside………

I just have to say that over the past couple of days, I have found myself saying to Kit, “phew, we made it through another Winter, thank God” (and then I look over my shoulder, remembering the April snowstorm of 1982)……..

Over the past 4 days I had to consider that sometimes, I just do the dumbest things (wasn’t the first time). Considering my unbridled passion for running around and snapping away at the glorious visual gifts that pop up or I search out, I found myself admonishing my thought process late last weed when I finally pulled the trigger and bought an iPhone 6. I was the last one in this family to do so. Huh? Really? Even my husband, who couldn’t care less, got one for Christmas, at the insistence of the kids of course, since he had the oldest phone in the house.

We have been playing “who’s got the upgrade?” in our house for years now. My son, Ryan, is always the first to have the new phone – he always was screening the upgrade schedule on the phone contract to see when he could zoom in and obscond with someone’s. (I always found myself on the bottom of the list – gee whiz, surprise) He’s been the gadget kid since he was a toddler and has had a fascination with telephones since he first saw them. My husband used to have to pick him up and let him play with pay phones (do we realize that just 20 years ago there were still pay phones everywhere?) wherever we went.

Well, anyway, I’ve digressed a bit here – the point is, that for the person in our house who is most interested in taking pictures, it was pretty dumb for me to wait this long to get the new phone. It’s just that ATT has changed their plan situation and now makes you pay full boat for the phone and not the requisite $200 for an upgrade. Shelling out $600 for a phone seemed superfluous to me….. This may indeed sound like a commercial for the iPhone, and I suppose it is. The picture quality is really quite remarkable and I could see this with the first photo I took:

it wasn’t the flower, it was the detail on the cuts of grass that got me – and so thank you again to Steve Jobs and company who brought the world of picture taking into a whole new realm for me! (please note that the quality of my photos doesn’t translate exactly to this venue 🙁 )

Well, everyone in the food biz knows the meaning of the phrase “in the weeds”. I did not learn this in pastry school or on the line. I first read it in my favorite Elin Hilldebrand book, The Blue Bistro in 2005, a favorite summer read of mine about a cafe on Nantucket. In the weeds has a different connotation for me, more literal……..

Yesterday was, as you can imagine, my favorite kind of day here. I spent the entire day outside working – happy as a clam was I. I put on my “work clothes” and had fun after spending some time at the nursery in the morning, deciding which plants to buy. It was time to clean out the long window boxes on my side porch and give them a facelift with my most-adored Ranunculus.

The whole day was a “giddy as a fool” kind of day for me – I got plenty dirty, did some digging and re-planting, had to change my clothes twice and got plenty of dirt under my fingernails. As I got in bed last night and flipped through the pages of my Spring issue of Santa Barbara Magazine, I had that happy feeling of having had a satisfying day 🙂 (but I did still think about how amazing it would be to live in my definition of US-paradise where it is like yesterday nearly every day of the year).

Ranunculus are my very favorite Spring flower. I do love Narcissus, Hyacinth and snowdrops, of course the Hellebores, but I can’t ever get enough of the Ranunculus. Take a look at this bounty from Floret Flower Farm on April 7 (if you love flowers, visit their webpage/fb – you’ll love it):

photo courtesy Floret Flower Farm

Honestly, if I could tolerate the rain in Washington/Oregon, I’d move there for the abundance of flower growers there! Such an amazing micro-climate! (note to self – isn’t the west coast a more suitable place for me in every way, top to bottom?)

I scored a few pots early, about three weeks ago at J&M in Madison. They had the most unusual color blooms that I fell in love with. Once I got them home, though, they went into a downward spiral and I am now trying to revive them.

favorite photo March ’15