Sharing Biscotti

This Sunday morning I brought along a small bag of my homemade biscotti on my walk to Starbucks. A friend of my challenged me to bring some since I was raving about the recipe that I made with pistachios and Sumbuco. I dropped a half a dozen of these gems in a zip lock and headed on my walk.

When I arrived, the people who challenged me were not there. I knew there was a chance that this was going to happen.

But. an elementary school counselor was there with his boarder.. a PHd student from China. They both had one along with their coffee. The counselor wondered why he had never had one made of pistachos.
He had some interesting comments about the part time counseling business that he has in Merced after his school hours. The Chinese student had some interesting comments over the solar business comments by Zaharias in the most current Time magazine. They left soon after as they had their little pooch outside on a string this morning.

My friends who are a kindergarten teacher and a GATE 4th grade teacher took their places in the only  two soft chocolate colored upholstered chairs at Starbucks. They both thought that they would like to try my biscotti. One of them suggested that I might like to try dry cranberries in them. We had some interesting conversation about backing up her laptop to a hard drive. I suggested two hard drives. She said her life was contained on the laptop and didn't see how she could recover if she lost the information on them. There was also some comment over the turnerover we see in our student population in the schools here. She had 14 different student in her Kdg class than when she started. Half of the 14 had not been enrolled in any school prior to attending her class.

My friend the former bookstore tech manager came in. He is now working transportation and parking up at the UC Merced. He enjoys his new job. The GATE teacher asked about how it was to come from the person everyone love to the one that they all hated... parking citations and logististics. He said that his greatest challenge was to get the higher ups to do what needed to be done as far as making changes in parking to accommodate the construction industry without totally selling out the mission of the University due to the growth of the school. He is enjoying the challenge of the of the job and its pieces. I told him I was interested in how universities had accommodated parking. SF State and UCLA are interesting examples.  I recommended one of the books that I bought for Linzi when I was down at UCLA called Free Parking about planning for parking and urban sprawl. He thought that he would like to look that book up. He is always in our Starbucks getting a cup of Joe for himself as well as getting a cup for his wife to go for home. I am sorry for his wife because I am sure that she has to drink a lot of cold coffee.. because he likes to talk like I do. It doesn't make for good take out.

My barista and shift manager took one when I offered her one. She guaranteed the best dupio machiato espressio I had ever had. I did not quite meet that kind of hype, but I appreciated the gesture.

I had to eat one of the biscotti so that my friends would know that they had met my approval.. so there went the 6 biscotti. It was well worth packaging them up for the morning walk.
I am blessed with so many conversational partners. I know they are essential to my retirement.

: ) Pat