2:45 a.m. A day to get out and mix it up, mingle with the locals, take the pets for a long walk. That would have been nice, but that's not what I did.

No -- I was good and true and dull and pasty and stayed inside and did more of the same old, living my life in front of the monitor, feeding the fabulous printer more and more paper, working on my stuff.

And then, at the end of the day I did go out for a little while for errands and supplies. And I got two different batches of the first cherries of the season from two different, expensive stores. There was hardly a good cherry in the entire two bunches.

In the last few years, stores have started putting loose fruit in little plastic baggies with half of the bag shredded in a lattice so that air will still get in. They will tell you it's for convenience, but we all know why they do it.

The produce guys hide in the back and carefully build those bags up from the rotten middle out. All the soft cherries and the ones with a little black spot on them or the ones with a whole side bruised and brown: these go into the middle. Then they carefully surround the foul cherries with half-way decent, but of course not the best, middle-level good-enough cherries.

Meanwhile, they're popping the dark, firm, succulent ones into their own mouths as they pack. Trust me. It's the only way I could possible keep getting these prepackaged bags with nary an edible berry or cherry or grape in the bunch.

In the old days, and probably (maybe) at the farmer's market, you can still make your hand into a scoop and grab up the good ones, letting the soft mushy ones fall back into the box. Or, you can pick up a nice stem full of firm but yielding, still-attached green grapes. The pre-packed baggies are always full of loose grapes, too old and infirm to hold tight to the stem any more.

Fruit is really lousy out here in California. I never expected it to be this bad -- I assumed, just like the rest of the world, that produce would be fresh and juicy and just picked, but that is not the case. Since there is no frost out here, and since the soil is sandy and amended, the fruits are watery and colorful and big, but tasteless.

Strawberries seem to only last a day or two and they are red, but not very rich or deep or seedy or ... or ... you know -- the way they used to taste when you were a kid. You can't ever get those perfect sweet marbly green grapes from Chile, probably because of a trade dispute. Instead the green grapes are big-toe-sized ovoids that are sort of dusty tasting.

If you want a good tomato, go to New Jersey. There's no other way. If you want sweet corn, go back East and buy it right in front of the cornfield and race home with it, phoning ahead if possible, so that someone in the kitchen will already have put the water on to boil.

Plus, many of the flowers out here don't have any scent. The classic bougainvillea, a flowering shrubby bushy almost ubiquitous all-purpose fence covering -- doesn't it sound as if it would smell like heaven, or at least like Hawaii? No smell at all. I guess it's because the flowers are not really flowers -- they are actually just leaves, only colorful. Like poinsettias.

But we do have jasmine, and just last week, when I actually did take the photo of the little boy and the dogs, I walked by some actual honeysuckle. It's very rare out here. You can suck the little blossoms -- did you know that? And you can put buttercups under your chin and if there's a reflected yellow glow, it means you like butter.

As far as I know, we don't have any buttercups out here either. Which is just as well, I guess. The corn on the cob ain't nothing to write home about, let alone phone.