Friendshipping

What can I do with all these garden vegetables?  We are buried in tomatoes, zucchini and other squash. It's a blessing and we have enjoyed eating squash every day for the past few months.  Layne is one of those rare people that thrives on repeats of the same thing over and over again.  I tease him that this taste for lack of variety is a quality that is good for our marriage since he has the same girl every day, over and over again, and seems to like it.

But I long for a bit of cuisine variety.  So I took to looking for recipes for squash.  I found an amazing variety of things that can be done just with zucchini.  So, in spite of my lazy tendency to stick to what I know, I'm going to experiment.  First on the menu is zucchini bread and zucchini chocolate cake.  I've done them before and they are pretty safe.  Then I'll advance into riskier territory.

I forgot to get a picture of friend Pat Green so all I have to show
for this past week is this representative sample of garden
vegetables that are currently keeping me busy finding uses for them.
Note the jar of pomegranate jam.  I made a batch from
pomegranates from our neighbor's tree.

"I love your red," my friend Pat Green said to me upon arriving for a visit with us on Sunday.  She was referring to the red walls that fill our living spaces, if you haven't seen them.  That is just the beginning of the things that Pat and I love in common.  She is from Boise.  Now.  She used to be a Fremont girl, which is where we met, worked together and bonded.  She is another of my few kindred spirits.  Like me, she is a lover of wild things, bling and philosophical talking into the night.  We spent three days talking and barely covered the surface of thoughts to share.  People come in various categories of intimacy, it seem to me; there are those that tell me all I want to know of them in a few minutes; those who could connect with me on many levels but do not communicate enough to discover them; those who hold a very different view of life but are interesting to connect with; then there are those who seem to ride on the same mental and spiritual roads that I have carved in my own mind.  With those special ones, the ride can go on indefinitely.  Pat is one of those for me.

Pat is from Boise.  Layne and I have decided that Boise is where we will go once our home is sold.  It seems to be a good compromise between leaving family (which still brings me sorrow) and leaving California (which Layne feels we MUST do).  It is a days drive from here, but closer to daughter Jessica and hub Chris, closer to my sister Maryanne and Layne's brother Lynn.  It seems to be a place that could attract our children eventually, should they decided to resettle sometime in the future.  How convenient it was for Pat to be from the very place we seem to be headed to.  She filled us with information about life in Idaho and which areas around Boise are most desirable.  Her presence seemed to confirm our decision to go there.  With a potential sale in the wings, we may be headed there sooner rather than later.  Or not.  Nothing is for sure, it seems.