Easter breakfast menu: hot cross buns, eggs, pineapple, and kumquats, just because they're so odd.


Easter dinner menu: baked smoked pork hocks, focaccia with tomato and rosemary, spinach tian, asparagus salad, and lime meringue pie.

Greenhouse news: Baby kale leaves are sprouting from last fall's transplanted roots.

Bird news: The goldfinches are patchy-yellow and rapacious. The extent of mourning dove romance in this yard is getting embarrassing.

Fox news: Staring at the house as if he's hungry for baked smoked pork hocks.

Coyote news: So close I can hear them yip conversationally after each howl.

Garden soil news: Easy digging, not too many weeds, and I have a new landscaping plan.

Novel-reading news: Wuthering Heights. Ever heard of it?

Music news: The first movement of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony gives me the same frisson as the Rolling Stones's "Sister Morphine."

Middle school dance news: "Awesome." "Epic." "Time of my life."

Red Sox news: Lost.

Yankees news. Lost.

Poem-reading news: Bei Dao. Check him out on the New Directions website.

Quotation of the day: Clover Adams talking about her close friend Henry James: "[It's not that he] bites off more than he can chaw, but that he chaws more than he bites off."