When a friend tells you she has wild roses blooming everywhere, it's not hard to imagine where the conversation headed to next to turning them into rose petal jam, of course. My friend Simona Quirini and her family run the beautiful Canto del Maggio, a B&B, restaurant and garden, about one hour's drive from Florence. We arrived to catch Simona with a wooden crate in her hands, already half full of blush pink flower heads, small and as fragrant as honey. It wasn't just roses that were bursting out of their bushes with colour and fragrance. In fact, every time I go to Canto del Maggio, I notice how lush the property is with fruit, flowers and plants, and every season there are bounties to be collected. The first time I was there I noticed the myrtle bushes and heirloom fruit trees little tiny, red pears and apples. The garden was full of summer produce and I stole green-skinned figs harbouring raspberry-red flesh off the trees. The next time I went, we picked ripe olives off the trees around the pool and took them down to the local frantoio, olive oil mill, to press the bright green oil out of them. I also came home with buckets of corbezzoli, or Irish strawberries, to make jam. This spring, I noticed the hedge rows of flowering wild strawberries and this last visit we picked the berries off them for an afternoon snack. With the help of my daughter (who was slightly more interested in playing with Simona's new puppy), we filled a crateful of roses and picked the petals delicately off and into bowls. We were using the rose petal jam recipe and the technique I learned between two wonderful sources Pellegrino Artusi's 1891 cookbook (this pastry recipe below is also inspired by it) and the Armenian monks on Venice's Isola di San Lazzaro Island where I worked for two autumns. The secret, other than having beautiful, small and fragrant roses to begin with, is in massaging the petals with a bit of the sugar and the lemon juice until almost a pulp to release the essential oils. What is the narrator's job - Writer - Cook - not enough information - Gardener
not enough information

"That's Glenn Miller," my father said. "But it can't be." He had the back of the hospital bed cranked upright, the lower lid of his left eye creeping up in a warning signal I'd learned to recognize as a child. My older sister Ann had settled deep in the recliner, and she glared at me too, blaming me for winding him up. The jam box sat on the rolling tray table and my father was working the remote as he talked, backing up my newly burned CD and letting it spin forward to play a few seconds of low fidelity trombone solo. "You know the tune, of course," he said. "'King Porter Stomp.'" Those childhood years of listening to him play Glenn Miller on the console phonograph were finally paying off. "He muffed the notes the same way on the Victor version." "So why can't it be Miller?" I asked. "He wouldn't have played with a rabble like that." The backup musicians teetered on the edge of chaos, playing with an abandon somewhere between Dixieland and bebop. "They sound drunk." My father had a major emotional investment in Miller. He and my mother had danced to the Miller band at Glen Island Casino on Long Island Sound in the summer of 1942, when they were both sixteen. That signature sound of clarinet and four saxes was forever tied up for him with first love and the early, idealistic months of the war. But there was a better reason why it couldn't have been Miller playing that solo. If the date on the original recording was correct, he was supposed to have died three days earlier. The date was in India ink on a piece of surgical tape, stuck to the top of a spool of recording wire. The handwritten numerals had the hooks and day-first order of Europe: 18/12/44. I'd won it on eBay the week before as part of a lot that included a wire recorder and a stack of 78s by French pop stars like Charles Trenent and Edith Piaf. What state is the narrator in after this conversation? - not enough information - Puzzled - Blaming the father for his emotional investment - Hungry
Puzzled

(Q).
Yes, it's actually happened to me before. Let me explain before I get called irresponsible, or incapable of having a dog, or incompetent, My dog is my baby, since the day I got her we've been inseparable. I learned from this mistake and have taken every precaution to prevent it from happening again. She was uninjured luckily, but I was freaking traumatized. I have a SUUUUPPPPEEEERRR long driveway, so I usually drive my truck to the end to check my mail, and on this particular day, I was out in my yard playing with Roxie, I saw the mailman drive by through my fence, and so we walked back to the house, I grabbed my keys, and off we went. This wasn't too long ago, maybe May, so it's hot, typical North Carolina weather, maybe 92 and some change, so my windows are down, because I drive a 13 year old black truck, so it's hot as hell, and it makes it hard to breathe. The AC works, it just takes time to kick in, and number 5 (my highest AC setting) does not work. As I'm driving down, I'm going maybe 5 miles an hour. I'm petting Roxie with my right hand when I feel her jerk out of my reach and I hear a bush rustle, I look to the passenger side, slam on brakes (because the last thing I want is to hurt my baby) and put the truck in park. Sure enough, my mom and her Chihuahua were out in the front yard, and Roxie, being her playful self jumped out and ran. She scared the absolute shit out of me, so now when I drive with her in the car, the window stays shut or cracked. Lesson learned. The writer thinks the mailman is getting ready to: - keep driving past the house - try and play with their dog - not enough information - put mail in the mailbox
(A).
put mail in the mailbox