Springtime indeed!

This picture really MAY be worth a thousand words, but I think that I'll elaborate, just a bit.

After all, it finally feels like spring has arrived. I looked at the weather for next week, and the highs during the day range from the 70's to 80's, no more dipping into the low 60's as the so-called "high"! On that note, we bought our first watermelon of the season which I chopped up this afternoon and we also drank margaritas, which seem like warm weather drinks to me. Also, I finally donned a new pair of sandals today which had been hiding out in closet, waiting for warmer weather. I am more than happy to report that they did not give me one blister, despite that I walked all around the Los Angeles Arboretum for a good part of the morning.

It is the yearly (I suppose) L.A. Garden Show, so Michael and I decided that it would be a nice way to celebrate a new month, especially the month of May. We arrived on the early side - this side of 10:00 - and wandered through some of the landscape design exhibits, many of which were REALLY cool. If I had my own house/garden and oodles of money to throw around, I would love to have some of the edible kitchen gardens or a native plant yard. On the other hand, if I had tons of time and energy, I could probably dedicate myself to gardening, but it just seems like such an endeavor! We do want to plant tomatoes one of these days, and we did come away with a few ideas, so that was a positive. The whole gardening thing, while it seems to suddenly be quite the "rage", does appeal to me, and it is on my life's list of to-do's.

In addition to all that coolness, just being in a beautiful space was a bonus. Despite living in the general area for 5 years, I had yet to visit the Arboretum until today, and we thoroughly enjoyed wandering around the spaces. There were wonderful trees and plants from Asia, Australia and Africa - many of them seemed like something that Dr. Zeuss had created! And we took a tour of the rose garden which isn't the largest one I've ever seen, but we couldn't get over how fragrant the flowers were! One of them, I kid you not, smelled like peaches. We finally arrived at a waterfall in the middle of the Arboretum, chased a peacock off the bench (yes, lots of peacocks just wandering around the gardens) and sat for a moment or two to enjoy the morning.

Once we finished with the Arboretum, we were "famished". Not really, but the long walk had definitely stirred up my appetite. Despite a refrigerator that offered plenty of options, we both opted to try a new (to us) Mexican place in Pasadena. A colleague recommended "Amigos Cantina" last week, mentioning that she actually couldn't remember the food after drinking two margaritas, but she thought that it was good. So, we took the plunge. To be honest, Pasadena doesn't have the *best* Mexican food in the LA area. Some of the taco trucks are pretty decent, we have our favorite one that isn't technically in Pasadena, so to find non-gringo Mexican would present us with great options. The place didn't look like much of anything, which I took as a huge plus, ditto for the table of people speaking Spanish right as we walked through door. After devouring over half a basket of chips and multiple bowls of salsa (they were very small bowls!), we moved on the the main event - enchiladas for Michael and carnitas sopes for me. With great energy and elán, we tucked into the heaping plates that arrived at our booth. Despite a valiant effort, we both failed in the end. It was just too much food, but it was so damn good! Plus, we each ate about half a plate, so we now have plenty of leftovers for lunch or dinner tomorrow.

After inhaling our lunch, a food coma suddenly slammed us. We returned home, said hello to the dogs, and promptly lugged ourselves over to bed, where we enjoyed a big, fat, Saturday afternoon nap. Definitely the only way to deal with a mid-day Mexican food coma.