Cade?

Yes, I have a cousin named Cade. And yes, he is named after Cade McNown. His dad is from Alabama. This kind of thing happens, and you need to be ready. He's a very cute kid, and my nephew Sam agrees, as you can see by the very agressive nuzzling going on.

The reunion was your typical 140-person in a mouse-infested kosher hotel being shared by an Orthodox rabbi convention and a bunch of Korean golfers kind of party. The highlight was...well, there were many:

• classical sculpture covered up to protect the Lubuvitchers from breasts
  
• brisket for every meal
  
• mice
  
• whiling away the afternoon in the Borscht Belt's best sushi bar/Korean barbecue/Benihana steak house
  

Five years to recover, and then it's back to the Catskills.

The Vegetables Have Arrived

Well, the radishes and lettuce, at least. Now we understand why you plant several times. Anyone for an all-arugula breakfast? There's plenty.

There also seems to be plenty of snap peas for the damn gopher, who may have gotten over his aversion to the organic rosemary-and-molasses anti-gopher plant spray. Something is eating things that are not ready to be eaten. If we don't have a good harvest, I worry that the bank is going to come seize the old John Deere. At least the locusts left us alone.

Watching the vegetables come in is a little nerve-wracking, even though you'd think most people plant gardens to relax. What if we harvest too many too soon? What if not enough grow? What about the gopher? Can anyone eat arugula every day? If the radishes are too spicy, does that say something about us as gardeners? It's a lot, I tell you. Plus I miss the plants while I'm at work all day.

Overall, though, turning $1.15 in arugula seeds into somewhere around 20 bunches of arugula ($2.09 ea. in your local Whole Foods), seems like the best ROI we've had around here since we bought Cisco stock in 1997. Unlike Cisco stock, though, it is easy to tell when your arugula has had enough and needs to be harvested. There's no chance that we will pass through whatever gardening analogy corresponds to watching a company that, really, you don't understand, go from 10 to 80 and then come back to 22 and stay there for 3 years. Stupid market.

A plant, on the other hand, can be eaten while you are standing in the garden. These are about a week away from bitter and woody, and so we will be eating very nice free salads all next week and then composting what's left to plant new arugula. Less this time, and staggered.

It seems like a better money saving option that the Governor of California has adopted. Yesterday Conan said that he's switched all Capitol toilet paper from two- to one-ply, saying, "It's not anymore the two-ply." While the New York Times maybe didn't have to leave his quaintly Teutonic phrasing intact, one still wonders if there are other ways to balance the books in the world's fifth largest economy. Farm stand, anyone?

or...

Maybe I meant, "Next, stop plumbing."

Matt and Peg

Dinner in the suburbs, what could be finer? With the fine new kitchen and shiny and paneling-free, we quickly went out and bought flanksteak. What's the connection? See, in order to have people over, we needed the dining room table cleared off. In order to do that, we needed to get one last piece of furniture - the hutch you saw here a week or so ago, and in order to have that delivered, we needed to finish painting the kitchen. I will not put my clumsy self and a bucket of paint near the new things.

So with the kitchen newly greened, and the wine glasses moved from the old mildewed cabinet to the dining room table to a nice, clean glass shelf, we were ready to begin. First to the meat case. Then to the grill. The grill was, unfortunately, blocked by a series of new hornets' nests. I am scared of hornets and decided that, having seen many beekeeping specials on public television, that the smoke from the grill would keep me safe.

The hornets stayed put.

Also, the new outlets were installed without a hitch. Next stop, plumbing!

Too many magazines

First, we just wanted the New Yorker. It had been a long year without it. Once we saw an ad that someone in Barcelona was selling 2-year old editions for 5 Euros each. That's just plain ugly behavior, and we didn't support it.

But we made our needs known, and my mom and Leah's dad got us subscriptions. The one from my mom got all crazy and started sending one to "Dean and Leah Barcan" and another to "Dan-Leah Barcan" (look for that name again on our first-born someday), every week. Somehow we're down to just one a week from three.

Then came the gift of the American Prospect, a good read but not exactly something you can flip through before going to bed. Then we had some stray frequent flier miles and they offered us subscriptions for 500 miles or so. Where can you go for 500 miles, anyway? Hello Food and Wine, Sports Illustrated, Organic Style, and some house mag that never showed up. In the meantime, Leah got me Dwell for Chanukah, before those others started arriving. We started ordering the Sunday Times, Josh finished things up with a gift of Family Handyman, and the total hit eight.

This, my friends, is too many magazines. Remember the series on Abu Ghraib? I don't. I was finding out Robert Kuttner's recipe for a progressive tomorrow. Susan Sontag's essay on war and torture? Nope. Plans for a new deck caught my attention. The only bright spots are that Sports Illustrated has declined in quality and now takes only 20 minutes from cover to cover, although that number may goup now that hockey has ended, and the fact that Organic Style is unreadable and gets recycled as soon as we see it. That one was Leah's idea anyway.

She's also the one who decided we'd order the paper every day, not just on Sundays. The doctor's office is quickly becoming a birdcage.

Outlet?

I've mastered gardening, so I'm turning to electricity. Sometime this week, I'm replacing all these old outlets. They're ugly, and that's reason enough to yank the wires out of the wall and start connecting them to new things. Yesterday I checked them out and they're all dusty and covered in cloth instead of rubber.

If you don't hear from me for a while, go on without me.

Owen is here.

Owen John Evans - John John John to you English speakers out there - decided that he'd be happier living in DC and so he gave up the apartment he and his lovely fiancee shared in Somerville. She headed south to work and he moved into our basement until he could get out of his job here.

It's been nice having a boarder. He does light cleaning and housework, tends to the animals, and protects the basement from marauders while we sleep. If anyone else would like to move in before you head off to Washington, that's fine. Personally, I don't support people moving away, especially if away is so damn hot all summer, but I guess you're grownups, and I can't tell you what to do anymore.

You're going to have to make it on your own. Good luck, and don't say I didn't warn you.

Hutch!

So on the way to Maine, we stopped at a furniture sale. A store we have gone to a few times to see what we would like to buy for the house, if we were fabulously wealthy, before heading off to a flea market to make our real purchases, was having its once-a-year warehouse sale.

A dining room table and our new hutch sat together as a package. We looked at the hutch. "It's a package," they said. "Too much," we said, releived. We did like that hutch. Then some other people happened by. "We like that table," they said. "It's a package," said the furniture guy. "Too much," they said.

"Wait!" said the furniture guy...