keeping busy

Well, my friends are gone. E keeps drawing pictures of broken hearts and crying little girls and writing poems about lost friends. Of course she really is very very upset, but her love the Miss Drama Queen side of her personality is helping her enjoy making a production out of it. Oh well. If that's how she needs to deal with it then so be it. Besides, I like her poems. They're very lyrical and touching, actually. I think she may be very talented with words.

Some of the changes that this move will cause became very evident for me last night. We went to our friends' house for an impromptu cookout. Normally, Lili would have been there too and the two girls would have played all night. As it is now, E spent her time annoying Q and they fought the entire night, until I sent Q home by himself (just down the road). Gah. Despite that, it was fun and I hugged friend DF and told him "See? We still get to have fun even though we were abandoned!" (Miss Drama Queen E comes by it naturally). DF and his wife were hosting a couple from Austria through SERVAS last night so we got to chat with them for a while. They were very interesting and fun, and the SERVAS concept is very fascinating to me. I don't know if I'm brave enough to join, but what a neat thing.

I went to the local Farmer's Market yesterday morning for a quick (and small) stock-up on fresh veggies, and then I picked up my family and we went to pick 11 pounds of blueberries at a local farm. I'm feeling rather full from eating fresh beans, potatos, slices of fresh cucumbers and tomatoes with salt and pepper, and blueberry pie. J wrote about blueberry pies earlier this week so I went online and found a good, simple recipe. I took it to the cookout last night so it's long gone, but I think I'll make another one today for the dinner party I'm throwing for my PTA officers. Goodness knows I have enough blueberries to make about 40 of them.

Food really is so much tastier fresh. Lynne wrote about this very subject in her blog a few weeks ago too. Something about summer makes me start to crave fresh produce. The warming sun and the smell of the earth must bring out some primal farmer hidden in me. The act of picking the blueberries was awesome, too. I hadn't been there before when they were this abundant. You could stand in one place and reach out your hand to bunches of gorgeous, fat, ripe blueberries in at least a dozen directions. The earth was just throwing food into my hands.

Speaking of food, I'm having fun planning for my dinner party tonight. We'll start with olive tapenade and crackers, and maybe some strawberries. I've decided on Giuseppe's lentil soup recipe, and spinach/ricotta calzones from the Moosewood Cookbook. One friend will bring a caesar salad, one will bring the wine, and I'll finish it off with another blueberry pie (with real whipped cream of course). Yum. My plan was to get serious again about losing weight once the big Month-Long-sendoff party (tm) was over, but it doesn't seem to be happening. Oh well. Tomorrow. Really.