No Snow, but Lemons!

This could have been titled "When life gives you lemons..." or "This Lemon-Made my Day"...

All this month we've been kind of bumming because we can't play in snow. There's Snowmeggedon back east, and tons of snow just north of here in our San Gabriel mountains. We can SEE snow from our house... its 80 degrees, picking citrus in sunshine--more on that below...and our view is of palm trees with a backdrop of white snow covered mountains. This is the insanity that is my beloved Southern California.

So close but so far....We were wildly unsuccessful in our effort to get to snow... We attempted to drive the 40 miles or so north to play in the snow after a historic snowfall 2 weeks ago, but in typical maddening L.A. SoCal fashion, about a billion other people had the same idea. So after 2 hours in ridiculous traffic, we drove our weary, carsick, boot-and-mitton-clad butts back home. I SOOOO have Snow-Envy, people.

So, I soothe myself with other pursuits...such as lemon-picking. I have ALWAYS dreamed of having a lemon tree. A producing lemon tree. (Remember that song " lemon-tree very-pretty and the lemons smell so sweet"? I remember humming that as a little girl and wishing I had a pretty lemon tree. What a crazy kid I was!) I did have a tree planted by hubs and my dad in our old house, but it produced like, 3 lemons a year. This house has a massive tree with tons of ripe fruit, plus flowers and green baby lemons promising a continuing harvest year-round. What a lucky girl I am!

Here's what we did today, February 7th, 2010:

Anyone out there have a good lemon meringue pie recipe? I'll be linkin' up to Mosaic Monday at the dear little red house...