I made lemon basil pasta salad for the first time this ‘season.’ It doesn’t have to be a summer salad but it seems I only make it in the summer. Watermelon was on sale at the grocery store but I’m afraid it is too early in the season I wanted to buy one and will probably go back before next tuesday (end of sale) because I really really want it. And then I’ll be disappointed because it isn’t sweet.
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This past weekend my son and his girlfriend were in a restaurant in New York City. It was crowded and while waiting for a table he was holding the door open for people arriving and leaving.
A girl walked in and recognized him, calling him by name.
I suppose things like that happen all the time. But this is different. The girl is my neighbor here in Washington, and they’d only met once before. She and her boyfriend are visiting New York for a week.
New York is a city of 9 million people. How could this possibly happen?
They both sent me photos with nearly identical captions, along the lines of “guess who I randomly ran into in Chinatown.”
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Great story! We once met the neighbors 2 doors down from us in the gift shop in Rome at the Vatican museum. We didn’t talk enough back home to even realize we’d both be there the same time.
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We just had a wooden pergola custom built on the concrete pad where the original one had been before the decades and ants and termites finished it off (it was old when we bought the house 35+ years ago). It’s just what H had wanted and provides some shade in the back so the sun doesn’t heat up the patio doors. The heat stays out of the living room. The wood for the pergola that is stained with a UV protective finish matches our white oak floors nicely.
To celebrate, we are a small having Mother’s Day early dinner party at our home.
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My former-LEO brother has a house on White Lake. For a minute, I thought it might be him, but he’s at his FL place right now, so I passed the link along. Nice story.
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That happened to my son, also in NY. He lives in CA. His now brother-in-law lives in Texas. Neither knew the other was in NY and they ran into each other in a breakfast place in .. either Brooklyn or Manhattan (I can’t recall). What are the odds?
We were recently on a trip in SE Asia. We walked out the front door of our hotel in Singapore , and there were two friends of mine (who are in my same profession) and who happen to live in the same building back home as the other couple we were traveling with! What are the odds?!?!
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My son’s cousin traveled with a friend from her Spain based overseas study group to London to visit the friend’s aunt. On entering the aunt’s kitchen the first thing she saw was a photo of my son, her cousin, on the aunt’s fridge. It definitely confused her a lot until they figured out that her friend’s cousin and my son attended the same small LAC back in the US and had played on the club rugby team together.
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That pasta salad sounds terrific; are you willing to post the recipe?
One summer a friend and I and our families went to DC. While there we twice ran into another friend
and her family who were in girl scouts with us in Honolulu decades earlier.
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These stories are fun so I’ll share mine…
My family was sitting at a Parisian sidewalk cafe while vacationing when I was a teen when we heard someone call out my dad’s name. It was our neighbor from down the street and none of us had any idea the other would be there. Our neighbor was a retired widow traveling with a group. We lived in a rural community of about 5000 so it was quite the coincidence having two households in France at the same time in those days, much less happening upon each other.
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We were walking through Times Square and my husband spotted our Toledo next door neighbor through a restaurant window. He knocked on the window and the guy came out. That was weird!
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There was a real recipe once, but I’ve made it so many times I just guess now on the amounts:
1 pound bow tie pasta
1/2 cup mayo
1/2 cup milk
zest of 2 lemons
juice of one lemon (or more, I like lemon)
1 cup of basil, chopped into ribbons
1/2 cup peas (some in my family don’t like peas, so I usually take out a serving or two and then put in peas)
salt and pepper
just mix it all up. It is so easy to take to a pot luck, but if I do that I have to make double and leave some at home.
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Thank you!
It’s coming to my next pot luck!
Too funny. I know I’ve posted this before, but when we were on our honeymoon, we went to a bar near St. John in the Caribbean you could only get to by boat. While we were there one of the admin people from husband’s office showed up with the son of one of the men from his office. (He knew them both).
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I live in a very small town in Michigan. My neighbor’s son, ran into a girl he graduated high school with in New York City. I think they knew each other were living there but it wasn’t a planned encounter and had never seen each other in the years both had lived there. He had just broken up with his long term girlfriend, she was single.
They are now married. To a girl he went to high school with. That he ran into in NYC.
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Not me, but a good friend:
Her son grew up in Town A. Went to college, went to veterinary school, was accepted by the Army to have his tuition paid if he committed to some number of years.
He was in Iraq, on a jeep going somewhere. A woman from the town next to where he grew up was also in the jeep. (She worked for the State Dept and was there in some capacity.) Fast forward: Married, with three kids.
Then there was the time we were in San Diego visiting my sister. Went to a playground with the kids and there was our across-the-street neighbor with all of their kids.
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Isn’t that a movie? 
I know! Isn’t it funny! Life imitates fiction!
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My daughter just ran into a sorority sister at a restaurant the other night. They went to school in Wyoming, and they were either in Clarksville TN or near Ft. Campbell KY (daughter’s husband works near Ft Campbell and this woman’s husband is stationed there, and D lives in Clarksville). Daughter went to put the women’s number into her phone and it was already there. (they weren’t good friends but obviously had a need to exchange numbers once before).
It’s happened to me a few times. Concert at Red Rocks, ran into someone from hs in WI. Bathroom line!
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S1 was traveling in Amsterdam and checked into a youth hostel there. Turns out the fellow who worked there attended the same HS as S1.
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