Today was a mostly lazy day, during which I did a lot of knitting and also finally finished Anna Karinena. Last night at the gathering Beth suggested I look for a different translation and perhaps that might make it better, but honestly, by that point I was 500 and some odd pages into it, and the thought of starting over from the very beginning was not appealing. Plus, I am not entirely sure that a different translation will really make me love this book (or heck, even *like* it) because ultimately, the plot will remain the same. Although they did point out that this particular translation left out all the sex, which leads me to wonder whether that might have at least added a point of interest - or perhaps humor - to an otherwise dreadfully dull story.

So now I am all ready for the tea and book club, with three weeks to spare, in which time I can cheerfully forget all the important details about the book except that a few someones have an affair and someone commits suicide and lots of someones are very self-absorbed and clueless and really, I am still missing the whole point of the book.

I mentioned a gathering, didn’t I. Last night was a little gathering of the Sacramento area TUS'ers, and I do mean little. There were only five of us, but we met at Café Bernardo and I had a bowl of delicious red lentil soup with just a hint of curry, and a hunk of chewy sourdough bread, and we sat around and talked about gardening and pets and insane relatives, and had fun. The other people I met are nice and funny and it is always good to be able to put faces and voices to words on a screen.

Yesterday was not as lazy a day as today, mainly because we ended up sliding inexplicably into a healthy food kick and a fridge full of fruits and veggies. It started with the farmer's market in Davis, where we usually do not buy very much. But yesterday we were somehow inspired, so I picked out mushrooms and corn and white peaches and a monster honeydew melon that could double as a deadly weapon if you dropped it on someone’s head, and Richard picked out strawberries and multi-colored cherry tomatoes and we both successfully avoided saying anything too snarky to the silly little people collecting signatures to get Ralph Nadar on the ballot. And then on the way home later we saw a sign for a you-pick place that we have passed perhaps hundreds of times since we have lived in this area of California, except yesterday was finally the day we decided to check it out. So we followed the mostly well-placed signs and parked and were given baskets and vague directions and off we headed to pick berries.

Apparently we lucked out, because this was the last weekend of the season for berries, and somehow there were still plenty of them on the vines. Richard likes berries, while I cannot stand them, but I still had fun plucking them for him. We filled two baskets with red raspberries and one basket with golden raspberries, even though we had only intended to get one basket of berries in the first place. But there was something rather compelling about lifting up a berry branch (gingerly, since they tend to be a little spiky) and finding perfect little berries hiding underneath leaves and then gently tugging them off into your hand.

When we had exhausted our patience with berries we then wandered around until we tracked down the peach trees so we could pick a small pile of yellow peaches to add the the rapidly growing pile of produce in the back of the car. And after that we decided it was time to quit. So we went home and ate cucumber and tomato sandwiches for lunch and split half of the monster honeydew melon, and sometime between lunch and when I left for the gathering in Sacramento Richard inhaled most of the raspberries. The white peaches are sitting in a bowl on the breakfast nook table, where I am hoping they will hurry up and ripen because I intend to turn them into a pie fairly soon, and I would prefer it if they were soft enough to comply.