[HazeyDaze] posted an entry about Memorial Day that mentioned a co-worker's search for Olallieberry Pie, and it's made me think about how much that dessert has come to mean summer to me.

The first time I ever had it was in 1990, when Santa Cruz was just beginning to recover from the Loma Prieta quake. My friend Jen and I had joined my mother and her friend Diane for a chicks day at the beach, and we spent a lazy hour at an outdoor table chattering and eating pie, and drinking iced lattes.

Later, as Jen and I walked along in our USF t-shirts, one of the local homeless guys stopped us, not to beg for a handout, but to ask what USF stood for. Giddy from sugar and a summer day, we challenged him to make something up.

“Unique Short Females,” he suggested, and we giggled, more because the situation was amusing, than for any other reason. And because both Jen and I top out at five feet tall. “Up Standing Flirts,” he added, then shook his head, “Naah. It must be Union of Soap-bubble Fillers,” he decided, and because we appreciated the absurdity of that definition, we agreed. We chatted a bit, asked if he'd lost anything in the quake the previous fall, etc. And as we walked away, he called, “Tell Father Lo **** says hey.” He was referring to Father Lo Sciavo, of University of San Francisco, which is, of course, what the letters emblazoned on our t-shirts really meant.

Since then this uniquely northern California treat has become a sort of summer ritual. My favorite way to eat it is slightly warmer than room temperature, like a sun-ripened berry, and garnished with a scoop of coffee ice cream. Not vanilla. There's something about the creamy bitter-sweet-ness of coffee that makes the essence of olallieberry dance on the tongue.

We haven't been over the hill to Santa Cruz in a while, and the last time we were there we had the dogs, so didn't wander, didn't eat pie. Perhaps after the Toronto trip, if Fuzzy can break away from work long enough, we'll make our personal pilgrimage, and sit at the cafe near Bookshop Santa Cruz, and worship purple berries and cold ice cream on a hot summer's day.

I am lucky, in that 95% of my time at work, the only folks who see me are the boys I work with. Okay, they're not boys, they're all my age or older, but they /act/ like boys much of the time, and they still dress like college students. In a sense, the guys I work with have become the older brothers I never had as a kid.

But I digress.

Much of the time, I come to work in comfortable clothes. I wear stretch-pants all too often, and baggy sweaters or t-shirts. This is all very ironic, because I love clothes, and actually have a closet full of really nice stuff, I just tend to prefer clothes I can sprawl in, at least at work.

Today, I chose to dress up a little. Not a lot, because our a/c at the office is iffy at best, and I don't like being hot, but definitely business casual. (For those who care, I'm wearing black, blue, and white plaid pants, black sandals, and a nice white cotton 3/4 sleeve top. And not golfer plaid. Nice jaunty plaid.)

And it's a good thing I dressed decently today. You see, CC, one of the guys I work with, whom I have described as 'adorable,' handed a client to me last week. A purchase loan he wasn't in the mood to deal with. We knew he'd double-dipped the app, and weren't holding our breaths that he'd return phone calls.

But he did. He called at three today and said, “Lock me! I'm coming tonight to sign stuff.” CC confirmed he didn't want the file back. So, I'll probably only make $500 for it, but that's $500 more than usual, and I don't care.

In other news, my allergies have triggered asthma reactions, so I've been kind of scarce online. The drugs make me grumpy, and groggy, and make my ankles and fingers swell. Ick!

But still, in general, life is good.