Microwaved

Everything at this upscale restaurant is microwaved.

Mary needed something to bring to Tom's potluck, so she bought a box of frozen plantains and microwaved them. Then she brought them to the potluck and pretended she had labored over them for hours.

After a dinner of 4 fresh green figs, some refrigerated pickled fig pieces, and microwaved spaghetti Alfredo, eaten on the balcony under a blue sky, I sipped my iced lime water whilst watching the still street below and the big tall conifer beyond. I've been talking to Michael the Dane-French ufologist in recent days about lots of things: My university was like a vacation of smart people, Zen gardens, stone libraries, and so forth. It's different from the suburbia here. We wondered if people staring addictively for hours on their smartphone would ruin their "mind's eye"—inhibiting one's own imagination. He noticed that their device distraction did ruin social gatherings in cafés. I just people-watch and meditate in the café: It reminds me of Arthur the Japanese-American software engineer in my software workplace in Japan; he could just sit on a counter whilst just staring at a wall for a long time. Lately, I've been asking Artificial Intelligence to write ballads and travelogues in Elizabethan English and nostalgic Tagalog. I pick blackberries on the walking way to Tim Hortons café: "¡Moras!" (Blackberries!), I often exclaim in Spanish. An Ecuadorian friend has "Mora" as his surname. He is partly Amerindian, maybe Incan. Today is the 3rd of August of 2025, here on Lulu Island. I went to Kin's Farm Market to buy a bag of 4 lemons, not limes, this time.

In the morning of the 11th of August of 2025, I microwaved the salty sushi-chorizo rice with nori sheets and bitter-melon mung-bean soup. I had also a mug of lukewarm lemon water. I ate on the balcony. Sitting out there near under the potted branching plumeria redeems my lost days of summer. Later, I walked, picking blackberries to munch on the way, to Tim Hortons café, there to have oat-milk iced coffee. Rod stepped in to get breakfast with bottles of orange juice before his and his wife's long camper trip circulating the BC Interior, being back sometime in September. His wife Joanne is open-minded, spiritual, and likes the stars and planets. She's Ukrainian-descent. In the afternoon, sitting and standing on the balcony, feeling the warm breeze, I sip my iced lemon water in a mug. Down below, the neighbour Moli Wong's rose garden reminds me of an Earth scene in Isaac Asimov's book, Pebble in the Sky.