Dogs, A Walk Through My Garden, A Bit Of The Bubbly, Happy Anniversary, And Lobsters.

This post will be a total mish-mash of pictures and topics.

Here's Junior, Youngest Hawthorne's puppy, sniffing Dixie's butt. Dixie apparently does not like for Junior to sniff her butt.

This is Dixie's pretty smile. It really didn't faze Junior. He kept on sniffing.

Here's convolvulus growing in my pot at the front steps. They made it through the winter and just started blooming.

Here's larkspur growing underneath my mimosa.

Bachelor's buttons and larkspur.

Mr. Lincoln. One of my favorite roses.

My roses.

Roses and larkspur.

Champagne! Oh ... Is it a special occasion? Cheers, Mr. Hawthorne. And Happy 27th Anniversary. Gee, do you realize if I'd killed you when I met you, I'd be out of jail by now? Dinner tonight is LOBSTERS.

Don't play with your lobsters. You may become attached to them. A little arrangement and the ingredients for my butter sauce: green onion shallot garlic wild onion from my garden lemon

I chopped the scallion, shallot, garlic, and some parsley.

Add the scallion, shallot, garlic, and parsley to the butter and add in the juice of one lemon. Nuke to melt the butter.

Next, the lobsters went into the sauna. Mr. Hawthorne had about 1 inch of water in the pot and cooked them for about 12 minutes.

What a lovely lobster. Or, as Aunt Sandy would say, "What a lllllllllovely lllllllllllobster." (But hers would come out of a can. And really no one would know the difference and you can take all the credit. Riiiight.)

Big ol' piece of lobster in melted buttah.

An excellent, messy, sloppy meal. Lobsters are da bomb. And lobsters and champagne were made for each other.

Dixie, Giada, and Junior. Dixie is fed up.

Now check out my little score here. A lady drove by the house while I was outside and wanted to look at my garden. And you gardeners out there know when somebody wants to look at your garden we become total garden whores. She was quite complimentary so I offered her a mixed bouquet of roses, bachelor's buttons, and larkspurs. She seemed very happy and thanked me profusely as she got back in her car. Later on, I went to Harris Teeter to get the champagne and a few other items for our celebration and ran into the lady there. She looked at the 2 quarts of strawberries in my cart and told me to put those back, she had a case of strawberries in the back of her car and she wanted to give some to me. I asked her if she'd been up to Currituck to pick like we did the other week. She just responded, "Don't ask where they came from." So I didn't press the subject. I replaced my strawberries and went back to my truck to wait for her. And she had parked right next to me. When she came out, she loaded me up with nine quarts of delicious strawberries. What a serendipitous and fortuitous turn of events.