Work Hard, Play Hard

After a week of work, work, work, Matt and I decided to use the weekend to work a bit and play a bit. The weekend was filled with falafel wraps at our fav little hole-in-the-wall, a viewing of Let There Be Blood (Daniel Day Lewis film), a fantastic discovery that the FX show 'Damages' is coming on tv here (very exciting to me and my mother who tivo'd the season for me all fall only to discover it had been erased), Saturday at a desk staring at a computer screen (but not blankly staring), stopping by the international market for a purchase from both the French cheesemonger and the French baker, church at a potential real possibility, brunch with Scotty and Rebecca (yummy french toast -- go Rebecca!), and finally, making homemade salsa this evening and having Scotty and Rebecca over to watch a show on gardening. Which sounds strange. Who has friends over to watch a show on gardening? Sounds a bit dull. However, this particular show, 'Around the World in Eighty Gardens' keeps my interest. Monty, the British host, travels the world, revealing gardens that tell something of their host country. This evening Monty was in America. Starting in NYC, he made his way from a garden in the Hamptons, to the Monticello in Charlottesville, to the prairie plains in Kansas, all the way over into Southern California to places such as the Lotusland.

Monty was particularly interested in how Americans used their wealth and power in the garden. Sadly, he maintained that average Americans care little for their garden (also known as yard in this circumstance). When we first moved here, I was so curious when people made statements like, "My young son doesn't have enough room to run in our garden." I was thinking, "Why would you want your destructive 5 year old son running amock in a beautiful, quaint English garden???" In this mind, 'yard' simply connotates altogether different things than 'garden'. Anyways, gardening takes not only a degree of skill but also a fair amount of time to invest in the yard ... that's simply the reason why we don't have our fair share of gardens. Maybe if we had the Europeans' vacation time, we could satisfy Monty's quest for American gardens!