Ode to an avocado

Went to lunch with The Engineer today. The original plan was to go for a drive in the convertible, but rain put the kibosh on that. So lunch instead.

I've been feeling malnourished lately, mostly because I have not been eating balanced meals . . . or even regular meals. So lunch was a salad -- avocado chicken salad. :sigh: It was pleasing to the eye and to the palate. For texture, there was the crunch of the batter-fried chicken and the heaviness of the avocado. For flavor, there was the mixture of greens, along with a few tiny tomatoes and olives. For tang or spice, there was olive oil and garlic on the sauteed spinach, plus the vinagrette for the greens.

I don't have the grace of language that Beth and Doug have when it comes to food (or anything else), but truly it was an excellent salad. It was good enough to inspire me to bad poetry, here's my haiku of praise :)

Oh, avocado --
bumpy dark skin conceals your
buttery green heart.

Had to look avocadoes up at Wikipedia. It's a fount of interesting information. Did you know that the Chinese name for avocadoes is butter fruit? Seems appropriate. One use/recipe was to spread avocado on toast and top with salt. Hmmm. Sounds good. Must add to grocery list.

ebook report

Recent ebook reads:

Betting Hearts by Dee Tenorio.

He's never lost a bet in his life but she's playing for keeps!

Cassandra Bishop’s boyfriend is back. Only problem is…she doesn’t want anything to do with him. Or his new fiancée. What the confirmed tomboy would like is to wring his neck. She might have done it, too, if he hadn’t filled her in on the embarrassing truth that he'd left her at the altar because she wasn’t woman enough to satisfy him. Her pride nearly settled for punching him in the nose…until she thought of something better—proving him wrong.

High on Burke Hallifax’s list of cataclysmic nightmares is having to look at his best friend as a real female. But when her ex-fiancé makes his wedding a personal vendetta against Cass, Burke has no choice but to bet everything on her ability to out hot-girl the competition. Unfortunately, the entire town is betting as well—on whether Burke and Cass can pull off the makeover of the century…without losing their hearts in the process.

I love friends to lovers plots, but am sometimes disappointed by their sameness. Not so here. This wasn't a faux friends to lovers story, where one "friend" has secretly loved the other for years. The two are the best of friends, only friends, and reading about the transition was fascinating. Only dings from me: the hero's issues about not being a nice guy (where'd that come from?) and the brother (he really irked me). Grade: B.

Learning Charity by Summer Devon.

Once a gentleman's daughter, the now destitute Miss Charity Vincent was forced to become Cherry the whore. Yet her core of a well-bred young lady remains intact-she is a thoroughly incompetent prostitute.

Eliot Stevens came from America to London for business and now he sees a way to mix his business with fun. Cherry can teach him the manners he needs to fit into society and in exchange, he can teach her about pleasure-which might improve her life or shatter it.

I liked the story and the characters, it just felt a little rushed. That's a constraint of the format, and my general complaint when reading short stories and novellas. Grade: B+. I'll be looking for other Summer Devon novellas.

Blackmailed by Annmarie McKenna.

Brianna Wyatt may be a victim of her father’s machinations, but one look is all it takes for Cole Masters and Tyler Cannon to offer her their own style of ménage a trois blackmail.

Brianna Wyatt’s father is blackmailing her into doing what he wants by threatening to send her brother to an institution. She would do anything to keep that from happening, including go along with his demented scheme of her getting pregnant by Cole Masters--a man who’s been rumored to share a woman with his best friend, and who leaves Brianna’s innocent senses in shambles.

Cole is sure he’s about to be blackmailed—why else would a man whore his daughter? But there’s something about her that neither Cole nor his best friend, Tyler Cannon, can deny. They want her, and don’t hesitate for a second on making their own offer. Her brother’s protection for her body.

When danger flirts with Brianna’s life, there is nothing they won’t do to keep her safe. Including listening to what their hearts are saying.

Oh, this book was a DNF for me. If it had been a paperback, it would've been tossed aside and hit the wall with a thump. Hot sex, zero plot. For a more eloquent, informative review, check out Dear Author, who is bluntly honest about this ebook's failings.

Other ebooks read: Darlene Marshall's Pirate's Price and Smuggler's Bride. Liked them as well, and I'm thinking about doing a group review of Ms. Marshall's pirate ebooks.

General ebook comment: I love the convenience of having multiple books at my disposal. I've only noticed two drawbacks: price and formatting. The prices sometime seem excessive in comparison to size/wordcount of paper-published books. I did the math based on a book that I have in ebook format and in print, then compared. Ebooks seem to cost considerably more per page than a lot of print books. The format issue is fixable, I'm sure, and is really a small thing. I buy from several sights; to load onto my eBookwise, I download from the e-publisher to my computer, then add to the Personal Content Server at my account at eBookwise.com. Then I can either dial in or download via USB hookup. I've bought from several publishers in HTML, and had the format go a little wonky, with dashes, quotation marks and other punctuation turning into question marks. Having ?s all over the page is a little distracting. When I open the files on my computer, they read fine; the problem seems to be with the eBookwise reading the files. Oddy, I have NOT had this problem with free HTML ebooks from Project Gutenberg or the UVa free online library, so I'm wondering what the problem is.

And I now have an ebook TBR "pile".