13 April 2001

We are not in day three of the berry crisis: my parents and I found blackberries at Trader Joe's (yay, Trader Joe's!) and blueberries at Safeway. So the double berry cobbler is almost done. Two minutes left on the buzzer. The chocolate turtle cheesecake has some more work left on it, but Mark is fetching me evaporated milk from the store, and then things should go fairly quickly. I hope.

Yesterday afternoon, Mark and I and the folks picked up the grands at Joe's house and drove up Mount Diablo together. It was clearer than I've ever seen it up there -- we could see the Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate, Livermore, and large portions of the Sacramento River. The wildflowers were in bloom -- iceplants, Chinese houses, yarrow, and especially lupines and California poppies. One of the times we got out of the car to look at our surroundings, I found tiny flowers, no bigger than my little fingernail, purple with red stripes. I don't know what they were called, but they were my favorites. You can't see them from the road -- you have to get out and scrinch down in the grass really close to see them. You have to act five years old.

Which we did. All of us, even with my grandma's bad knees.

I don't think I could pick a single thing that I admire The Most about my grandparents. (Yes, my by-now-notorious dislike of total orderings rears its head again.) But right up there on the list is that they're still willing to run around looking at new stuff and trying to figure things out and finding out stuff they didn't know before.

I have to bake the crust for the cheesecake so that it's ready for the caramel layer. (The juicy berry part of the cobbler overflowed. A bit. So "clean oven" got added to the "to do" list. Lovely. Evidently they lied about the 9" pie pan thing. Next time I'll know.) We're heading into Stanford today, and then up to Walnut Creek for Good Friday services. Every year since I was 15, I've been praying that the pastor did not feel it necessary to have the theme of the sermon be, "Why do we call it Good Friday? What's so good about it?" Two churches and four different pastors total. Maybe this will be the year. The rest of the Tenebrae service is so powerful for me that I can deal with repetitive sermons. But last year's Easter sermon from Larry was about Emily Dickinson, so I hold out some hope.