Living Loquat

At the farmers market yesterday, I was able to get some good prices on apricots, strawberries, and loquats. I've only recently discovered loquats when a colleague brought some in to work from her neighbor's tree.

Loquats look like apricots with one pointy end and are a sweet fruit but aren't otherwise similar. What they do remind me of though, in consistency (juicy pear-like), seeds (round central cavity with large wedge shaped seeds) and skin (thin), is a fruit I bought from a market in the south of France. To this day, I still don't know what this fruit was, but it was the size of an orange, medium orange in color, almost perfectly round, yet otherwise very loquat like. I ate it with the skin on, but someone local told me to peel it first. Eh. It was fine. The Clustrmap at the bottom shows I get the occasional European reader. If you know what fruit I'm talking about, I'd sure love to know.

While I'm waiting for the universe to get back to me on that, I'm off to gas up for my trip to San Diego tomorrow. $4.639/gal! A book club friend and I will be hitting up a Janet Evanovich booksigning and sunning ourselves and eating from the best bakery in the US. The last time I went to one of JE's booksignings (book 12), I was in stop and go traffic for 3 hours and got there right at 7, was number 454 in line or thereabouts, and got the dratted thing signed by 10:30pm only because a good hundred or more gave up. The good part was meeting the friend I'm going out with tomorrow for book 14.

Based on traffic woes from out last trip to SD, we're going to try and leave early so we get there by 11am and hopefully miss most of the traffic. I don't know about the coast roads, but I've definitely noticed that the freeways are relatively clear on weekends until about 11, at which point they start to gum up. By noon, they can be at a standstill and stay that way until about 7pm. So, 2 hours to SD or 5-7 depends on when *I* wake up, not really my strength, so wish me luck.