Finally a morning at home

This week has been more demanding than usual and this is the first morning I can do what I think are four of the most beautiful words when strung together: go back to bed.

French guy wanted me to get him up at 7:15 this morning. For some special reason neither his hi-tech phone and up-til-now-reliable watch alarm could not do that job. Do not ask me why these things happen. He said we could have breakfast together! Surely that tugged at my tenderer side so I said OK. And, the one morning I so look forward to sleeping late I have to be both the wakeup call and breakfast fixer which meal, interrupted by his extended cigarette break, made me gently ponder that maybe I'd do well to run away from home soon.

Having said that, the days this week were long and fabulous, including yesterday when a ticket to the Women in Business conference was a gift from my friend and last weekend's bunk&cabin mate LuAnn. With our lovely friend Juli, we had some specific comments about the potential improvement of next year's conference (having written "NONE" when asked on the survey which tasks we'd like to help with in 2009), we ate good food* and especially enjoyed learning about the wonderful Crown Jewel Club and its spectacular work to raise the quality of life for young girls who live at-risk here in LA. I am likely to add volunteering with them to the things-to-do-in-my-vast-spare-time because I was really moved by this story. 

*The morning pastries and Champagne reception at the end were my favorites!

Thursday was Pancake Day at KABC radio, which is every other month, and I go to haunt all the lovely people who are indulged by the world's best pancakes, prepared with the ultimate TLC by one of my angels, an elderly gentleman named Lynn Mink, whom I absolutely adore. I say that my job is to help Lynn, but really I just go to get in the way, visit with Mark&Brian and their entourage at KLOS and the same for the ESPN sportsradio guys, and be generally useless. But it is tremendous fun and worth the 5:30am wakeup call to be there at 7am. 

After that, I met Doll, my sister, to peel 40 lbs. of potatoes for that night's Senior Dinner, for which we and our other sister are the chefs once a month here at a local church...there are typically 100+ attendees. (These lovely people choose their restaurants well!) Each third Thursday from Sept-May we get to work with a host of other angels in the kitchen and serve some of the sweetest people we've ever known, a gourmet meal that is prepared with pure pleasure and all the love we can possibly pour into it. So, it tastes really good - to everyone - and while we all go home comatose and exhausted from head to toe, it feels incredibly good. And, my pure reward for Thursdays in general is to watch the one-hour AC Milan show on GOLTV from 9-10pm...a true reminder that life is very very very very very good.

I had had to break from the dinner prep to do my SportsBites radio show for which I was my own guest! I did the entire show alone and spent the hour mostly making myself laugh with my own humor. When I listened to the archive I had to hope that my listeners didn't think I was completely wacko. I even told of a soiree with a guy in Italy but spared everyone the rest of the story about how (speaking Italian, mind you) I tried to get him to take me to Milan for the weekend to see the soccer match between Milan and Torino. When he'd asked me what was in it for him I had laughed and indicated pretty much anything he wanted!! I really wanted to go to that match!! But he was too lame to even take me up on it, what a fool. 

Meanwhile, I promised to post the recipes I mentioned on the show, and I will get those to you in a future blog, I promise...I probably should be cutting this one short by now.

Wednesday night French guy and I went and watched some sports at a bar down the street and ate little burger sliders. We had tremendous fun discussing which we thought are our favorite worst restaurants which he thinks is a good topic for a future blog, so look forward to that! "Our teams" that night, the Dodgers and San Antonio Spurs, both won so we were happy. I told our bartender this on our way out, but she looked thoroughly confused and I don't think she knew what I was talking about. 

Tuesday I did a big bake job for a client's sales meeting. I got a raging headache from baking 8 recipes that clearly made me OD on the essence of sugar. Now I still have enough packages of mix so that even if I baked it all off it still would be too much to feed the village. Right now the box sits in my car for later-dealing-with. More than you need to know I'm sure.

And then, one of the big highlights of my week, were two emails back-to-back, from the handsome (let's just call him) "G" in Italy, whom I met the last night I was in Roma in November. He had crossed my mind last week and it had been some weeks since we'd written so hoping that he hadn't yet fallen in love with another woman he met near Piazza Navona, I dropped him a note in my best Italian...and he wrote back immediately inviting me to Naples, where he is now...and added that if I wanted to go to Positano, Amalfi, Ischia, Capri, and Sorrento ("all of these are beautiful places!" he writes in his best English as I read with delight realizing that I've always wanted to go to those places, and ideally with a man), that he would be happy to take me there, and signs the last note, you're in my heart.

Move over, Sebastien Frey.