My mother and I went to a restaurant today, just as we do most Tuesdays. It was a restaurant she had been to, but I had not. She told me that she really liked the place. My first impression, once we entered, was that the place looked very neat, modern and clean.

She was like a sister to my wife, and a very good friend to our family.

It’s been six months since I began pursuing an interest in trees. I had decided I would like to learn the names of all the trees I saw in California. Little did I know then, of what I recently read: About 3,000 species of trees are in California. But I got a great start when Brenda, the director of CSUN’s Botanical Garden, introduced me to CSUN’s Office of Sustainability, and their location guide to their 3600 trees. Having walked all 25 quadrants of the CSUN campus, I feel I have a good grasp on identifying almost all of their 200 different species of trees.

I thought about Biblical Videos (I love watching them), my Tree Hobby (I love identifying them), and Filling My Ink Cartridges (I love filling them and solving the occasional problems with them).

Look what I just purchased on the Internet. It looks like a small gooseneck lamp – without the lamp. Instead of a lamp it has a clasp to hold the iPhone. The neat thing is that it clips onto almost anything.

When I heard that the son of the leader of my Sunday group was going to have a big celebration, my mind went into action.

I don’t get to garden very often. Usually, I plant flowers my wife likes a couple times a year, and in March I plant flowers and vegetables.

This week I began printing out the books I made for and gave to my grandson over the past four years. Why did I do that? Why keep a set of those homemade spiral- bound picture books at my house?

It’s funny. I don’t use sugar on anything. When I drink tea, I use Splenda. I don’t even use salt. But when we visited our kids in L.A. about a month ago, they introduced us to a xylitol sweetener. It was so remarkable that I have been thinking about it all month. Last night my wife and I finally stopped at Whole Foods and bought a bag of Xyla. Of course, I also bought a box of strawberries to go with it.

Today for the first time since I purchased my Adobe Photoshop Elements some years ago, I used it like a pro. It just seemed to happen. I used the “Google image search,” “Adobe quick selection tool,” “the iMac’s copy & paste,” and “Adobe layers,” to create scenes much more easily and professionally than I had ever done before.