Lovely surprises

I don't mind eating fruit...but I like it to be sweet!  Pineapple is my favorite fruit (yes, I turned my tongue numb when my mom took me to the Dole plant on our first trip to Hawaii...but part of that was from the long pineapple spears that they served back then on the airplane trip over) but I actually like grapes and pears and mandarin oranges as well and I will tolerate most others as long as they are sweet.  My problem is that I don't know how to pick sweet fruit, and I have failed miserably at keeping it around and trying to let it ripen enough to sweeten BEFORE it rots.  I have some idiosyncrasy wherein I start choking if I bite into an apple that still has its skin (so, I had a brief moment of panic when a friend asked me to pick up a bag of apples since I don't know what to look for to choose sweet ones) and we actually never eat the apples that grow on the tree in our backyard (bugs eat them first) whereas the resident squirrel is very efficient at picking our apricots, extracting the pits and throwing the fruit onto the ground.  Yes, I have been tempted to find a lethal solution for the canny mammal but instead elected to wait until he died of old age (and I am still waiting!).  Anyway...we received the most excellent surprise today from friends...an Edible Arrangement©.  Now, if you have never seen one of those, it is an arrangement of fruit that is shaped into flowers.  If I ever figure out how to shrink my camera pictures, I will post one but until then, picture pineapple cut into a flower shape (and dipped in chocolate on one side, mmm-mmm) with a cantaloupe ball as the center, chocolate dipped strawberries, orange sections dipped in chocolate and regular strawberries and grapes...wow!  Beautiful, tasty and good for you, what more can you ask?  And yes, the chocolate takes care of the sweetness (and my friend reminds me that there are lots of lovely antioxidants in it).  Diet?  What diet?

Another lovely surprise is Lori Foster's upcoming Run the Risk.  Wow!  Great addition to her pantheon of lovely romantic suspense books.  I am REALLY behind at writing reviews and had no business stopping to read this one but it grabbed my attention and I wasn't able to put it down until I finished (well, I fell asleep but I finished it this morning, lol).  Great story, hopefully I will get the review up in a few days, but if you like romantic suspense, put this on your must buy list!



Ok...off to eat more fruit (0: