Snapdragons for Moms

From yesterday's trip to Home Depot

Yesterday Chef and I were at several garden centers (as has been our Saturday ritual for the last couple of weeks). We were looking at some colorful plants and I was continually drawn to pink gerbera daisies. There's just something about them that makes me think HAPPY. Maybe it's because I always wanted one of those dancing daisies that would sway to music. Remember those? They were so fun as a kid and were the true trailblazers for Big Mouth Billy Bass. I'm fairly certain that time will tell those dancing daisies were the jumping off point for artificial intelligence.

Anyway, amid the beautiful plants were snapdragons. My mom used to plant them in just about every garden we had because my brother picked them out as a kid and that just stuck with her. And then when it was just the two of us, mom and I used to pull the blooms off and make chains of them and decorate our necks and wrists with them. I used to pretend that I was Hawaiian and I would hand them out to my little friends as leis.

The snapdragons were just a little thing that reminded me of my mom. There are literally tons of them every year; little things that remind me of my mom. One of my twitter friends told me it was her first Mother's Day without her mom. "Does it get any easier?"  she tweeted. My reply was that it does. Mother's Day, her birthday, major holidays all get easier. You prepare for them and have a moment when things are sad, but generally you're able to move on.

What doesn't get easier and is always lovely and horrifyingly sad are those snapdragon moments. Random Tuesdays when you'll see any episode of "The Big C" that makes you bawl or smell her perfume on a stranger and realize you may be following that person around Lowe's on a way that's bordering on stalking.

Here's to mothers, here and gone, and those snapdragon moments and memories.

"How did I get here?": Nursery Edition

A cactus we got this weekend

Despite the title of this blog post, it has nothing to do with explaining the birds and the bees to kids or really anything infant-related. Instead its about nurseries of the plant variety and how I've come to find myself willingly going to them in the middle of the Saturday afternoon sun.

The answer is simple: Chef asked me to. The reason is more complicated. Kind of.

Until we moved to LA, we were lacking a few things: 1) a patio or any outdoor space that was at least semi-private 2) beautiful weather, year-round. Those two things are crucial to being able to grow much of anything on your own. At least I've been told. I can kill anything green just by looking at it. I think it senses my apprehension to plant items since I spent much of my twenties avoiding eating them.

When we have a little patio and some steady sun, Chef decided he'd like to utilize them to grow things. He'd been asking for houseplants for a while, but I was skeptical. Mostly because of my aforementioned brown thumb and us having kitties that can easily use their extra toes to scoop dirt out of a plant and on to the floor. I was being practical, really. But then we saw an episode of "My cat From Hell" where they planted some indoor cat grass for the cats to have "salad." I thought it was a good idea and Chef jumped on it, so we headed to Lowe's to get some supplies. And then we headed back for more supplies when the cats loved the cat grass. It was on this second trip that Chef decided that growing some succulents would be fun and got some.

Here's one of the many reasons I love Chef: he has passion. When he has passion for something, he leaves no stone unturned for finding the best way to do something. I firmly believe that passion is a big draw for most women. We see a man has passion for something and know that if he has passion for something, he can have passion for us, too. Which is why I believe that so many women go for sports fans and then get pissy when the guy still likes sports after they're together. Passion isn't transferable. You don't lose passion for something because you gain passion for something else. But I digress.

Chef's succulents then grew to include herbs. hydrangeas (which I picked out for me but he keeps thriving), orchids (which I picked out for me because I heard they were hearty and needed little attention), various other trimmings from his other plants and two small dwarf fruit trees.

Chef's passion not equals time in the sun around plants for me, but also a crop of lemons and limes some time in the future. Not too shabby. Too bad my writing passion doesn't provide anything for him. . .yet.

Pizza Slut, Vampires, Stuffed Animals and Succulents

Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, on
the left, Soleil Moon Frye on the right
(Man scratching his head-dead center)

I spent the weekend carbo-loading. Not for any particular reason other than I had a heart-to-heart with myself last week and decided that my skin, hair, body and clothes were telling me one thing: I needed to try harder. It's not my full effort and without that, I can't depend on my best results.

So between my gorging of all things baked, fried or just plain delicious and shopping at various nurseries for Chef's new love of gardening, I got my car fixed (kind of. The damn tire pressure sensor was off for half a day and then came back on which sent me over the edge in a fit of fury), added red to my head, got my hands and feet all pretty in coral, and saw Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, being interviewed by Soleil Moon Frye (aka Punky Brewster).

Chef was gracious enough to go with me to the Bloggess event (book reading, signing and interview thingy) even though he wasn't totally into it. I could tell because he was looking up gardening stuff most of the time. However, I enjoyed it, although there was a lady there who blogged in the voice of her stuffed sheep which kind of creeped me out. The Bloggess is delightfully dirty and odd, but that was a little odd, even for me. Also, Stephanie Meyer, author of the Twilight series, was in the crowd in cognito. I remember seeing her at the time, but didn't put two and two together. As is the case when you're still reeling in laughter from a story about an at-home cleanse using ex-lax and a question from a lady that came through the voice of the stuffed goat she blogs through (FYI- the goat was not full size, but rather a small hand-held goat. If it had been full-sized, I think I would've been less confused. Maybe.)

After that, I helped pick out two plants that I wanted because they were pretty and made me happy. Then I decided that I needed to concentrate on making myself happy, in various ways. I bought a book of writing prompts, read about 100 magazines that had been piling up, and decided to get my ass back in gear. Again. YES AGAIN. I work out now and count calories, but I haven't been super strict about my diet in a while. And while I haven't eaten an entire box of TGIFriday's potato skins and an entire DiGiorno pepperoni pizza (that may have happened in the past, I'm just saying), I also haven't stuck to lean proteins, restricted carbs (my love for which can only be topped by my love for Chef and our cats, most of the time), and eaten fruits and veggies. So back to the original diet plan it goes. I even had Chef buy my old protein shakes when he went to the grocery store. I had a French Vanilla EAS CarbAdvantedge (yes, it's spelled like that) this afternoon for my "high-protein" snack. And tomorrow, I go on a cleanse. We'll see how that goes.