Thanks for the greeting. I've posted many times before... it's just been awhile since I've checked the forums.

Greg and Joan, I'm looking forward to more pics from you two! Golden Pagoda is intriguing. You don't see that one much, and I bet it gets very prominent points in the Houston heat. Joan, maybe you hire a little crew of teenagers every Spring Break to help you out with those 200 trees! Can't wait to see the blooms that are developing here, and you bet I'll post when I get a chance. Robert, that Lemon Drop is Thornton's and one of only a few big ones I have. It's certainly the "branchiest". That's what you can look forward to in a few more years! Bill, our little guy gets us invited back to a lot of places! We would all love to go back to CA soon. Will definitely let you know if we get a chance. K, glad the seeds are coming up for you; they're the perfect flowers for a Texas drought! Yes, that is TLD on the tree because my memory is just THAT bad, lol. Sometimes I abbreviate and then ask myself, "Now what the heck does that stand for again?" Dave, thanks for the compliments! I'm in Austin. We're 8b but I've seen at least one big plumeria tree kept in the ground all winter in my neighborhood. It can be done in a sheltered spot with frost cloth since our freezes are all short-lived. Mike, I found another possible oh-please-let-it-be inflo today, so I feel like I won the lottery! Hope you also have a great bloom year!

lindaohnowga, my robin and I am flattered! You certainly may, as long as it's only for personal use. If you make the cards to sell, then I'd like a cut of the profit (unless profit goes to charity) and a copy sent to me. :O) As always, beautiful photos everyone! Murraysmom, I LOVE your stenciled chair! Bigack, your park photo looks like it could have been taken near here! bob_cville, I've read that birds will fly into a window that is too clean, therefore it reflects light and outdoor images perfectly so that they don't recognize it as a barrier. Try putting a sticker on your window to let him know it's not a fly-through area. :)

Post dinner report. We had about 20 people over for this buffet meal. The idea was to bring out seafood dishes one at a time. Sides and salads were available throughout the meal, and people took plates and sat wherever they wanted at two dining tables, on the living room couch and chairs, or just standing around. As DD and I planned the meal, it started making sense to deviate from the traditional Seven Fishes dinner of full -on entree dishes. Instead, we decided to have every seafood dish more like an appetizer, that you could eat off a small plate with just a fork, so that the evening was more like a cocktail party with endless food. We also decided to keep each dish simple so that preparing seven dishes and serving one every 20 minutes wouldn't be crazy. To the extent possible, we'd prep ahead. When guests started arriving, we had salmon mousse on crostini ready. Two kinds of salmon mousse, because DD objected to my version. I make it by baking salmon, then putting it in the food processor and adding a couple garlic cloves, some shallot, salt and white pepper, heavy cream, a little bit of brie cheese with rind, a pinch of wasabi, lemon zest, processing to the desired consistency and taste, then placing into a squeeze bottle with pastry tip. DD was outraged at the brie cheese, and insisted on making her own version. Which, in the end, included cream cheese :-) Next was a shrimp louie salad. SWMBO made this, so I don't know what was in it. We made a clam fettucine, following a recipe that was so minimalist, it was intriguing. Heat a few garlic cloves in wrote a lot of olive oil, discard the garlic cloves, add clams in shells, cook until shells open, remove shells, extract clam flesh, return clam flesh to oil with parsley, cook a couple minutes more. Yes, that was it. This was a good cookbook, so we thought maybe the stripped-down recipe would bring out the essence of the dish. Turns out it basically yielded clams... in oil - ick. So we used the result as a base for a more full featured clam sauce, which salvaged the dish. DD made oysters in a leek sauce. You shuck oysters, clean the shells, lightly cook oysters to release liquid, combine the liquid, white wine (not too dry - or champagne or Prosecco), and cream into a sauce - there was more to the sauce but I wasn't watching closely - assemble oysters on beds of wilted julienned leek in the shells, broil, then sauce and serve. Meanwhile there was manicotti as well as other side dishes and salads that people brought, on the buffet. I made crab cakes. This was crab meat, minced onion and garlic, parsley, salt and pepper, a little red pepper flake, mixed with boiled and riced potato, molded into patties, dredge in egg and coat in Panko crumbs, then deep fry. A messy thing to do but they came out nicely. Normally I use egg and bread, not potato, as the binding agent, but we were trying a recipe from the Peterson book. It is a cross of crab cake and latke. Personally I prefer the way I usually do it. Then we broiled some halved lobster tails, with plenty of melted butter. We should probably have extracted the meat and cut it to bite size pieces, in keeping with the cocktail party appetizer theme, but by now we'd been cooking for hours and were getting bogged down by guests wandering into the kitchen, helpfully and insistently busing piles of dirty plates and glasses into the midst of our prep and cooking space. So I was having to do dishes while DD cooked, and our smooth process was getting chaotic. That's the drawback of a small kitchen. My new dishwasher requires a particular workflow. One side of the sink is full of soapy water. Dishes are scraped into the other side of the sink (that has a garbage disposal) then placed in the soapy water. When enough dishes have accumulated, they are removed from the water and placed into the rack which is loaded in the dishwasher. After the dishwasher cycle, which takes three minutes, the rack is removed and set on the counter. The dishes and glasses come out very hot so they are dry in a minute. Quickly remove and stack the clean ware. This is an effective way to wash a lot of dishes very quickly, but definitely interrupts cooking. The seventh dish was to have been scallops in lobster butter. We collected the lobster shells and were starting to make the butter, but then SWMBO reported that everyone was full and it was time for tea, coffee, dessert and the White Elephant present game. So we shelved the seventh seafood dish with some relief. There was still a lot of cleaning up to do!