Three Mentions of Recent Success

I ate four apple cider doughnuts on an achingly autumn afternoon with my father Federico and my mother Melanie and my sister Nicole and my brother-in-law Mark. Not pictured above are the wedding I attended the day before in Gloucester for Amy and Don or the striking colors of my first return to October in Massachusetts since 1999.

I took a Tuesday lunch at home as a challenge and constructed my finest sandwich in recent memory. Highlights include the first bite, the second bite, the last bite, and all those other scrumptious bits between.

I revisited fully, every page and word, the Lord of the Rings for the first time since having seen the movie, as evidenced by a particular Saturday afternoon at Volunteer Park Cafe. In the books, the women receive less attention and the men are all more obviously in love with each other, though less annoyingly so. I'm not sure Sauron has ever had Côtes du Rhône wine or bacon-chevre-chanterelle quiche, but maybe if he had he wouldn't have been such a jerkface.