Gonna Make a Pie With a Heart in the Middle

So I am ashamed to say this, and it scares me a little given that I'm about to move back to scorching Texas in a couple of months, but I have become a real heat wimp in the last five years.  Last year the thermostat in Denver didn't even reach 80 degrees until around mid-June, and the hottest days we had all summer got up to 92 or 93 degrees.  Most of the time the temperatures stayed in the low 80s, and I recall complaining when I went swimming outdoors that it was too cold.

And that's why this summer has been a shock to my system.  By June we'd had temperatures reaching almost 100, and this past weekend we actually managed to reach those triple digits in Denver for the first time in a couple of years.  It turns out that even with the dry air in Colorado, a building without air conditioning doesn't quite cut it.  I've been sweltering all month.  So you can imagine my joy this past week when a rainstorm came through and, for an evening, cooled it all down.  I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and bake, since these blueberries in my fridge had been calling my name for a couple of days, saying "Robin! Bake us in a delicious pie!"

So many berries!

Fun With Mom

It's been a good week.

Last Sunday Greg arrived in town, and I went to the office and worked for awhile alongside him.  It was nice to see him, but we didn't get a lot of time to spend together on this visit.  This is because he was pretty busy on the database, and also because my mom was in town.  That was a busy weekend - I was running around all over the place to pick up things like an Aerobed, sheets, closet organizing stuff, etc and then spending a lot of time cleaning in preparation for her visit.

Mom arrived on Tuesday night, and we had dinner at Charlie Brown's and then stayed up late chatting, as is my normal tendency when faced with visitors I haven't seen in awhile.  On Wednesday we got up early and went downtown, where I had breakfast and we sat for a little while until I had to go to work.  That was a difficult workday - I was tired, and I knew I had to leave earlyish, so I had to be efficient.  I met up with Mom at six o'clock and we headed to Cafe Colore, one of my favorite restaurants downtown, for dinner.  I had a wonderful vegetarian angel-hair pasta dish which also featured pesto and goat cheese, and as soon as we were done eating we hurried over to the Pepsi Center for the Carole King/James Taylor concert.

'Cause I wanna be neat and tidy!

Thank god for visitors.

For serious. If it weren't for the threat of social/parental ostracism, there are areas of my apartment that I would never clean. I'd be moving out and suddenly discover nooks and crannies that haven't been disturbed in four years. That's the sad truth.

Today, spurred on by both my mom's impending visit (she arrives Tuesday) and the ever-looming move-out date (most likely October 15), I decided to tackle the most dreaded of all the junk spots in my apartment: the bathroom closet.

Now, despite the fact that I live in a studio, I have ample storage space. Perhaps TOO ample. The bathroom closet is spacious enough to walk in and close the door after you; there are shelves on one side and a built-in pole for hanging towels. I've been storing everything from sheets to towels to medicine to makeup to cleaning supplies in there since I moved in. But since I've been adding and occasionally throwing things out at random, it's become this black hole of stuff. Here's a picture (no, I did not do anything to make this look worse than it was).