hey jud

It caught up with me unexpectedly this year. Labor Day weekend arrived, the weather changed and summer was gone. Friday night we walked home through the North End and caught the final, and biggest, Italian festival for the year, participating fully with a plate of fried calamari while watching a guy strolling around followed by his pet duck. What kind of Italian tough guy has a pet duck anyway? Saturday's weather was the most perfect early fall day and I walked the esplanade. Sunday was gray but ideal, per Martha, for cleaning the living room windows. And shine they do with just slightly more than four years of built-up dirt removed. The shafts of light through the newly clean windows put me in mind of the way the sun beamed in during Ted Anderson's Labor Day sermons on Nantucket, and I recalled his inspiration and wished he hadn't retired. Monday I put together a few photos to end the miscellany of the weekend.

A Beatles song comforted me September 11, 2001 and again today I was greeted by the Beatles. As we drove across the bridge this morning the radio began to play 'Here Comes the Sun', the start of our ritual playlist for the trip up the mountain to Mad River. Somehow in all the zillions of times I heard it I never noticed the particularly appropriate lyric "I feel the ice is slowly melting", our constant hope for the ski conditions to be found when we arrived. The song was a reminder of days when we were all together, all the time. Now it's emails and phone calls, and only holidays, or short vacations, when we actually connect. I love my independence, and how I can get completely wrapped up in my daily life, and I like to allow that for my children as well. But today I'm thinking of how those times to connect can be so quickly and unexpectedly lost, and reminding myself that independence is one thing but a little more connection can never be too much.

Now you probably think I've been resting on my laurels as Google cook and all, and that I was just a one tip wonder in the world of cooking. But fret not. Today I bring you another revolutionary cooking tip, down from the high tech to the low tech basics. This somewhat daunting tip which you must necessarily, try at home, was taught to me by my inestimable friend, Chris Millard. Who knew her tip could change my life with avocados and now yours as well.

You know what happens when you cut an avocado in two and easily peel and cut up the first half? You've got the second half left with that pesky big avocado seed stuck in the middle, and by the time you wrestle it out, the avocado is a mess with the only good result being what you can lick off your fingers. It's a shame to waste so much of that second half and now you don't have to. Simply lay the second avocado piece on a firm surface, take a sharp but not necessarily heavy knife (I'm partial to my paring knife) and give the avocado seed a good whack with the blade of the knife. Then pull up on the knife, and if you whacked hard enough, in addition to the whacking satisfaction, you'll find the avocado seed sticking to the knife leaving the second half seedless, perfect and ready to peel.

Not this past weekend but the one before, with camera in hand we drove up to Salem to visit the Peabody Essex Museum, walk around a bit and have those fabulous mussels cooked in Belhaven Beer again. The mussles didn't measure up this time but the museum more than made up for it. It's much too big to see in one short trip so we just concentrated on the architecture of the new wing, designed by Moshe Safdie and open only a month or two, and the reconstruction of a 200-year old Chinese family dwelling called the Yin Yu Tang House. After the museum closed we added in a walk around the historic district of Salem with a stop at the best dahlia garden ever. And that's saying a lot when it beats my other all-time favorite dahlia spot in the Jardin des Plantes.

Franklin P. Adams got it right when he said "I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way." Here's what I found along the way, and zut!, it's just what I need to prepare for my next Paris sabbatical. Oh and money too if you'd like to donate.