I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing.

Sure, you’re old. Put on a little weight, probably lost a little hair.

Ok, I saw you hogging ginseng and stuff on a poster in Chinatown.

But you’ll always own a special place in my heart.

Many happy returns!

It’s the year of the Tiger. Tigers and I are sort of missed connections. It’s not like I didn’t make the effort, there’s always something missing in the mix.

It’s supposed to be winter, but we’ve had really nice breaks of Spring like weather interspersed with depressing rainy weather, which is sort of a nice break. The cherry blossoms outside our house bloomed profusely, sending KF into some sort of sakura obsession – every time he sees them on the street he’s impressed all over again. To the point where he contemplates growing one in our spot on the sidewalk (aka pavement – there’s a hole for plants for each house. We currently have a flowerless, fuss free tree the previous owners planted). I tell him it’s trickey, we gotta pick the right variety, cos some of them grow really tall, some have nicer flowers, some have scraggly twigs, some have nicer shapes, but he’s at the anything-goes phase.

So off we went to a garden centre (aka plant nursery) to look for cherry/plum trees. We figure we’d just pick them by the blossoms, but they weren’t blooming. It seemed like only the nectarine trees were (!!), but the flowers were too small and the wrong colour – white. I wanted something dark pink or a soft red. They also have something called a pluot – a cross between a plum and an apricot, though it exhibits more plum characteristics (as opposed to the aprium which exhibits more apricot characteristics; it’s the whole Liger – Tigon thing all over again).

Anyway. We didn’t find what we were looking for. Maybe next year.