Nature is Very Cool

Way back when, the boyfriend brought home a bunch of plants from the Shedd aquarium. Their time in the big leagues were over and we were their retirement home. They sat around, looking quite dead...and then...they bloomed.



Pretty, pretty orchids!

Garden

An excerpt from an email the boyfriend wrote me about his preparations for a stupendous garden:

"If everything goes according to plan, I'll be up to my ears in tomatoes of all colors and shapes, choking on fresh tomatoes with mozzarella and and drowning in gazpacho, floating in a bath of tomato puree with big tomato steaks covering my eyes. I'll be sipping Bloody Marys, surrounded by women in tomato bikinis dropping cherry tomatoes into my mouth while fanning me with over-sized tomato foliage."

A Reminder Of A Presence

And, just so we're clear, I miss the boyfriend aka Old Man Milkweed. It's a bummer having him in Georgia and having me in Chicago ... and that's it.

Lunch Number One and a visit to the roof

Lunch usually consisted of a make your own salad and a few things on a very effective hot plate. This first lunch was a yummy salad and some of the boyfriend's family's favorite things: spinach, stewed tomatoes and cheese souffle.
After lunch the boyfriend and I went up on the roof of the house where we found a lizard with a hold in itself (we named him Holey...and thought he could be quite good friends with Stumpy).

Mr. Mustachio

Since Thanksgiving I've insisted that the boyfriend grow facial hair. This insistence was born out of a certain curiosity...the curiosity of what the boyfriend would look like if he let a beard grow more than three days. He, I'm pretty sure, was not very into it and kept threatening to shave the whole thing off before I felt the experiment was finished. He did, however, shave a majority of it off the day before we left Chicago. But, once again, at my insistence he left a mustache...I thought it looked quite dashing...the boyfriend thought it made him look like an adolescent from the seventies. I say potato he says stupid...we've called the whole thing off.

Mango Mouth

The same night as the chicken, the boyfriend ate a mango.

The Boyfriend Is, In Fact, My Hero

This is a quick posty post brought to you by the brilliance of the boyfriend...he got a new camera cord, you see...he's also just brilliant. So below is a picture of the cactus (in profile) that attacked my foot a little less than a week ago.
This is a close up of the spikes...there were six of these spikes in my left foot...I mean whole spikes, sticking out, precariously and painfully. The boyfriend, as I mentioned, pulled all these spikes out...but the bottoms were a little (read a lot) reluctant to vacate my foot flesh.
Then, two days ago, the boyfriend pulled this sucker out of my foot. I will gladly admit to how proud I am of this picture and use of penny as a comparison....I mean, it's a big friggin cactus spike...and I walked around with that guy in my foot for five days!
I've also eaten many a meal since the camera problems started. But I'm going to save them for later.

Curry

The boyfriend made a lovely coconut curry with stir fried tofu. Oh my, what a treat, what a nice thing to come home to. I have so much homework to do and I'm not sure I can do it all but, but, like I should and I will and I have to and gosh.

The Boyfriend's Pork Roast..Take 2

I was walking home after a pretty long and not wondrous day...barking dogs, cold wind and snow, three hour night class...feeling very tired and grumpy when I saw a blur of black on my right (where the street was). When I turned my head I saw a man running at me, smiling madly like he knew me. I thought 'well here it is, I'm going to be attacked by a crazy man' before realizing that it was the boyfriend. I yelped a little then told him how much he had scared me. He hadn't meant to scare me, he had meant to meet me as I walked home to give me some Hot Chocolate. How nice is that? How crazy am I?

Dinner was served around 11:30pm. The boyfriend made pork roast marinated in red wine vinegar, bay leaves, cloves, sage and rosemary then lightly breaded and pan fried. He also sauteed wild rice. It was tasty.