Prunes

 

The weekend was "all manner of directions" in terms of goings on:

• My wife and I made homemade pizza for dinner using a pizza dough ball crust we found made locally and sold frozen.  We let it thaw and it rose to about 6X its original size from its yeast. The pizza turned out wonderfully, and the crust was excellent.
• We went to Mass at a parish across town where we heard a sizable number of our former parishioners were going to.  It was nice.
• I ran 11.1 miles (~18 km) outside this morning.  
• After I returned, my wife and I dressed and went to a funeral.  The spouse of a recently retired, long-time friend and colleague had passed away. While, the occasion was, of course very sad and somber, the funeral Mass was meaningful and beautiful.  The parish where the funeral Mass was held is one my wife and I are planning to try, not having been to Mass there in a few years. 
• The "stuff" I no longer talk about remained "even keel" this weekend, so that was a relief.
• My wife and I went to an outdoor concert again on Sunday evening.  It was very nice.  The group even played a piece by Phillip Glass that was arranged for Wind Band last night!  I tend to greatly enjoy his compositions. 
• I had an interesting dream on Saturday evening that I even recalled! In this dream I was a tremendously younger, brown-haired/bearded me who was in graduate school.   There was this developmental biologist there whom I took several classes from.  He had a rather gruff persona, but I learned a helluva lot from his classes.  This is so, even though he actually was not at all involved in my research dissertation work, as I had my primary research professor/mentor and two other professors as my committee.  But, this particular developmental biologist specialized in work with avian species, specifically chickens, which was a bit outside of my mammalian focus in my research.  This fellow (like many of my mentors and teachers in graduate school) was a pipe smoker.  But, this fellow smoked a pipe tobacco that was especially pleasing, however I did not recognize it.  Even though in real life, I was far too timid (and very much wet-behind-the-ears) at that time to chat with him other than to occasionally ask very specific, academic-only questions.... and typically only in class.  But, in this dream I had, somehow this fellow and I were just chatting casually about all manner of things.... some biological, but all sorts of other things as well.  And, in my dream, I asked him what type of pipe tobacco he had, tossed his leather pouch towards me and offered to have me try a bowlful.  In the dream, the pipe tobacco was wonderfully pleasant, and it smelled exactly as it always had around the hallway leading to his office and lab all those decades ago.  I never found out what the pipe tobacco was in the dream.  But, the dream was very pleasant. 
• I very much enjoy prunes, although because my wife is not.... we do not get them often.... mostly because I do not think of them when I happen to be at the grocery store with her.  I like dried prunes, but I especially like the jarred prunes.  
  

PipeTobacco