posted caddy ever after to su-lin, and then to the florists, but goodness, i have never had such difficulties buying flowers before! brattle square florists, always overcrowded with lush blooms, looked distinctly sparse, and what flowers they had were rather dull-looking, woebegone, as if they'd fallen down in the rain and been picked up again, and there were not many varieties either. i had hoped to get peonies, or else something tall and assertive, but there was nothing that suited, so i went up the road to petali, my other favourite florist. again i was thwarted - there were hardly any flowers in at all - is the season, the weather, or the day in particular? - ordinarily they have a much larger selection of unusual flowers, all rioting in glass vases, but today only fifteen or twenty varieties, forlorn in their jars, and the shop simply gave off the impression of paleness. i considered the kinds of bouquets i could put together - ranunculus (yellow) and sweetpea flowers (light orange) with pale orangey miniature roses? i didn't think so, they competed too much, were too wimpy. there were pink and white sweetpeas flowers, but the only other flowers of that colouring were peonies - too big to go with sweetpeas, surely? and really shocking flamingo pink roses, no no no. that left the gerberas, which i never like because they look somehow manufactured rather than living flowers. so pink was out too. in the end i went for purples and whites: pale blue freesia, dark purple monkshood, white lisianthus, and a very small perky purple foxtail (i think) so that the monkshood didn't look like it stuck out too much, and a thin-petalled flower i haven't the name for. not my ideal bouquet (i think it could have been filled out with a dutch iris (for that lick of yellow amongst the purple) and perhaps another white flower - snapdragon for height, or perhaps just scattered sprigs of white fillers - but it was the best i could do given the selection there. they're for mihaela, who, with darryl, has invited me to dinner tonight at their new apartment in central square. (japanese-themed, says darryl.) so then it was to tealuxe to buy sencha for darryl and burdicks for chocolates for each of them. both of them having graduated this year, this is likely the last time i'll see them - well i'll probably see darryl in singapore now and then but mihaela, possibly not for years, unless she comes to visit, or the other way round. i made some lemon agar last night but they were not particularly presentable today. we shall see. i go.