Reading: Anne of Green Gables

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

Watching: rain chasing sun chasing clouds through blue sky

Listening: Framing Amy (a band at the Taste)

2 September 2000: Taste of Colorado

This morning while RDC slept, I lay on the porch with Blake reading Anne of Green Gables and watching the sky grow overcast. That's pretty much a perfect morning in my book. After RDC motivated and I made up excuses not to tape the dining room windows (to wit: I want narrower tape that won't block all the wonderful sunlight), we went to Taste of Colorado.

The demographic is a lot different than that which throngs the Cherry Creek Arts Festival. There's a small cluster of better restaurants (among them Wolfgang Puck, so not that great) but the majority serve turkey legs and spare ribs and roast ears of corn. Good stuff, though, still. I partook of a lobster and crab phyllo purse (actually that was Friday at lunch from work), and a portabello mushroom cap with buffalo mozzarella and yellow grape tomatoes, and some baklava, and a chocolate truffle cake. That last we ate from within the fake Greek temple during a passing rainstorm.

When Dora and Melissa told of their meeting in New York and discovering that on one single glorious upcoming evening, Lloyd Alexander and Susan Cooper and Robin McKinley all would be at a single bookstore, I melted into a sticky green pool of jealousy. I couldn't think of a good reason I didn't have a spare $500 to go and partake of this delight. Friday night, CGK gave me a good reason not to regret buying a house instead of going to New York: Margaret Atwood is going to be at the Tattered Cover LoDo on that same evening reading and signing her new book Blind Assassin. And CGK loves Margaret Atwood probably about as much as Melissa loves Lloyd Alexander, so I can go with someone just about as enthusiastic.

So. When we got back from the Taste, I took the stepladder out to the nectarine tree, which is certainly a nectarine and not an apricot tree now. For next year, we need an extension ladder and some kind of fruit picker, to harvest the fruit before it falls and splits or bruises at impact, and canning or other preserving equipment. This year, there is a thick bumpy carpet of nectarines under the tree, thoroughly buzzed over by happy fruit flies and drunken yellow jackets. Next year, even if I harvest better, I doubt the insects, birds, and squirrels will starve. They'll just have to share, maybe, instead of taking a bite here and a nibble there and ruining three pieces of fruit while consuming only a half a nectarine altogether.

And after the fruit is gone, the tree needs pruning. I know how to take branches off trees with the least possible stress to the tree, and I've got to do this before the tree gets ripped up more. Last weekend, a branch broke off in the wind and ripped off another lower branch in its fall--both branches loaded with fruit. I am going to coddle this tree: I don't think that it's as happy as it should be growing between houses and I don't want it to lose any more healthy branches--partly out of concern for the tree and partly out of concern for our squirrels. The lower branch was a favorite napping spot for one of our female squirrels, cool and safe, and the day after that branch got torn off, I saw the squirrel sleeping on a windowsill on the north side of the neighbors' house. Which isn't as cute for us to watch or as convenient to the squirrel for snacking.