Family is here and more family is yelling at me on email and I am exhausted.

The best thing in such a circumstance is to eat delicious things.

Here is one good reason to live in California: fruit. Fruit fruit fruit. There is so much fruit it falls off the trees in people's yards and gets smashed as people walk over it. I used to walk under this one tree to get to the bus. Every day I would get brown gack on my shoes. This went on for two years before I realized they were FIGS. Figs! On a tree in the front yard! The people weren't picking them!! They were just letting their bounteous purple figs fall onto the sidewalk and rot.

This is the case for lots of fruit. No one eats their entire tree full of lemons, or even makes the effort to get out a ladder and pick above head level. Instead, they let the lemons fall into the yard and mold. Same with oranges. Same with plums and weird baby mangoes and kumquats. Our apartment complex has a row of cherry trees that get picked totally dry by the squirrels and birds. Then there are the giant hedges of rosemary that line the streets practically everywhere you look. They are landscaping! This makes it really easy to make good marinades, since you just have to walk up the street and pick a branch, but still. It is infuriating! The citrus harvest in southern CA was apparently killed by frost, but I guess there are still just too many lemons to use up here!

The worst part is how lots of these trees grow in people's yards, and you get a glimpse of their abundantly full branches over the tops of the back fences, clearly never picked, never used, and never obtainable.