pekmez

when zubatac's cousin visited us when gljiva was a few months old, she
brought back a last-minute present for gljiva's great grandma, some kind of chocolates wrapped in dumb US flag wrappers.

They were a big hit, but we didn't spot them on our way out last time and I'm not sure I've even *noticed* the duty-free shops at Logan before. But something similar has been requested this trip (we leave on Monday night.) Anyone know where to get other Boston or US-themed touristy chocolates, or have info on what one can buy at the airport on the way out for an international flight?

I recently made some cookies using half a recipe that thus called for half an egg.
With the other half an egg, I mixed it up with some milk and sugar and tried making it into custard. I have never made custard with a real recipe (maybe a pumpkin pie filling is
the closest I've come, and that was a while ago), but it seems I have absorbed enough
cooking knowledge to get the basic idea. a tiny bit of made up custard in a tiny double
boiler with a completely arbitrary amount of milk and sugar, and some cinnamon sprinkled on top, turned out fine and tasty!

This Saturday, April 1, at 8pm there's a local blues rock band called The Usual Suspects playing at Temple B'nai Brith's annual Vashti Dance. We hold the dance in honor of Vashti, the queen from the Purim story who gets banished for refusing her husband the king's demand that she dance in front of him and his friends, and raise money to benefit RESPOND, a domestic violence shelter in Somerville.

The band is lots of fun, and the cause is great, and if you drop by on the early side, you can dance
with us and gljiva - not sure how long we're going to stay out. Hope to see you there!

Temple B'nai Brith is at 201 Central Street in Somerville,
on Winter Hill just off Broadway.

So, this is not really a useful medium for this question, but I haven't come up with a good
answer and I'm feeling like I ought to do something and many of the people on my friendslist
are local.

We have a small Somerville backyard. It keeps getting overgrown with weedy grass that likes
to grow really tall, and even in the best of time management scenarios we can manage a cycle
of "whine about it for a month, kill part of an afternoon with a weed whacker, feel grumbly,
repeat." Our time management situation is about to get a lot worse.

In the long term we want to do something cool like plant a ground cover that will take over the yard,
not need mowing, and look nice. Or maybe pave half the yard and ground cover the other half, or something.

In the short term, we just want some way to ignore the problem. I thought we'd pay some
gardener/landscaper type to just deal with it, maybe putting down sod that might stand a chance
against the weeds, but I only found one (via arbitrary google search) and I'm not spending $3K on
a temporary solution that might not work, not even including paying them to come back and mow it or anything.

But given the baby arriving sometime soon, even something less complex would be nice to hire someone
else to Deal With. Anyone got suggestions for someone we could pay to weed whack the yard, and then lay down black tarps or landscaping fabric or something over the yard to just kill it till next spring? Or
even someone who could weed whack or mow it every few weeks till it stops growing this fall?