Blueberries on the Scale

So, chapter 2 of the blueberry saga. Since I have convinced myself you come here because I have Opinions, today's post will be entirely made up of Opinions. What did I like about the day at the blueberry farm? What was less than my favorite? Get yourself a cup of coffee, because this is going to be long.

This time was on Pearl's clock when we left the House on the Corner. Saturday morning, people. It was Saturday morning and I was already in the car at 7:26. And I didn't even have the satisfaction of knowing we'd left on time, because we planned to leave at 7. On a blueberry scale of 1-10:

This is me trying to find the blueberry patch. Yikes! This place is so remote that it does not have an address. Do you understand what I'm saying? I couldn't even input the address on my phone and claim technological failure when I couldn't find the place. Navigation R Not Us. Blueberry rating of ease of finding the farm:

Nothing says you're in the country like sharing the road with a cow. I loved this cow. It made me feel like a complete pioneer, a hunter-gatherer with air conditioning and non-functioning GPS. Fortunately for the cow we were hunting and gathering blueberries and not hamburgers or she might have been speeding up a bit. Blueberry rating of the cow:

The blueberry farm itself was astonishing. There were no mosquitoes, folks. No bugs of any kind, in fact, unless you count the bee that was buzzing around and well, you know how I feel about bees. Lance and Elizabeth, the owners, personally gave us instructions on how to pick the berries, since we were complete novices. You don't really pick them; if the blueberries are ripe they practically fall off the stem into your hands. It's a caress, maybe a fondle, but not a pick that yields the ripest blueberries. Also, did I mention no bugs? Blueberry rating on the facilities:
 

Okay, in the interest of truth and justice and the American way, I must admit that blueberries ain't cheap even when you provide your own stoop labor. Persons such as myself who are accustomed to fruit costing 19 cents per pounds (bananas, on Tuesdays, in 1987) will gulp just a little bit at the price. When the sun was at its peak and we were beginning to get a little swoony Husband pointed out that if he had stayed in the office and billed out standard rate he could have earned, let's see, carry the two and multiply by...well, significantly more than we saved by picking our own, and that doesn't even count the cost of gas and lunch. At that point I batted my (sweat-dripping) eyelashes at him and asked "Yes, but what is fair market value on a full morning with a beautiful woman these days?" and he realized he'd gotten a bargain. Blueberry rating on the price:

And later that evening, when Husband stuck a fork into the juiciest, tartest, sweetest blueberry pie ever, he forgot all about the morning he could have spent at the office. Pie trumps economics every time. Blueberry rating on the day:
 


We'll do this again.

In Which I Leave the House

Husband's legs and blueberries.

There are all sorts of activities in this world that, in theory, sound like they would be just oodles of wholesome fun. I have compiled a whole imaginary bucket list of such activities: Making my own mozzarella. Tap-dancing. Learning to play the accordion. Hiking the Appalachian Trail. Etc., etc.

I have said to myself about each and every one of these things in the bucketful of activities, "Hey! I'd love to do that! Imagine pizza with homemade mozzarella. Yum! And I have pretty good rhythm--tapping should be easy." Etc., etc.

But in the pursuit of truthiness, I admit that I have not done any of these things. Instead, when tempted by a wholesome activity I have almost invariably sat down in my easy chair with my knitting and turned on the television. First to allow the Portuguese to break my heart, then to recover with Masterpiece Mystery (and may I just say that if you missed The Escape Artist you missed SOMETHING! Holy cow.). Given my druthers, I'd probably never leave the house.

Saturday, though, I finally completed an activity on my imaginary list, and it was oodles of wholesome fun: Husband and I went blueberry picking.

I know! Who IS this woman, up at an ungodly hour on a Saturday morning, when there was sleep to be slept and yarn to be knit? That would be this woman:

On the descriptive tag the nice blueberry man wrote to show which bags of fruit were ours, he wrote "Pink shirt. Hot." At least that's what Husband told me, and yup, that is one hot chick. What he had actually written, though, was "Pink shirt. Hat." to signify that I had completely sweat through my canvas Puravida Costa Rica hat. Or maybe just to signify that I had one on, as opposed to the younger and fitter pickers that day, who had not reached the age in which comfort trumps vanity and you DO NOT CARE that you look like a dork in that hat. A sweating, red-faced dork. A sweating, red-faced dork who has had a ton of fun and has four gallons of blueberries to show for it.

There were things I loved, loved, loved about picking blueberries, and things that I was not so crazy about during the morning, so I'm going to split this experience up into a couple of posts. But of all the items on my wholesome activity bucket list, this is without a doubt the sweetest bucket.

It was worth leaving the house for.

To be continued.

Friday Orts and a Blurb

Happy Friday, everyone! And especially happy Friday to Boy#1, who is celebrating many, many years on this earth today. Woochy-woochy, one-year-old boy with your oh-so-fashionable suspenders and the bare feet that drove your paternal grandmother crazy.

You were the trailblazer, the first part of my heart to permanently walk around outside of my body, the one who took me through the looking glass into the wonderland of motherhood.

Happy birthday, One. You're still the coolest, smartest, and best-looking.

*****
Something Boy#1 will be glad to be half a nation away from is this:

Yes! A tomato! ready for picking!

Boy#1 does not like tomatoes, not even the homegrown variety. How can this be my child? Maybe he isn't the smartest after all.

*****
Speaking of having children, if you don't and have been curious about the experience, in the spirit of the World Cup I present the following. Being a parent is like being one of the blue-shirted players:

*****

Scribd

And finally, a blurb especially for my fellow book hoarders.

I was surprised at how many of you admitted to being, like me, a person who is perpetually half-done with half-a-dozen books. Who knew?

This week I discovered Scribd, which has been described as Netflix for readers. It's a subscription service that has a TON of books (that's the actual number of books they have) to download any time from anywhere. It works across platforms, so the same book I have on my iPad can also be on my computer and my phone and accessible anywhere I am desperate for literary escape.

Scribd didn't see fit to sponsor this post (booooo!) but they sponsored one on Finslippy, and gave her a code that qualifies you for three months free trial. You can bet I signed up for that, and have finished one book and am halfway through another.

One advantage of advancing age is that I don't remember which books I read before oh, say, yesterday, so I didn't recognize the name of the second book I chose and was 50 or 60 pages into it before I realized "Hey! This is sounding familiar!" Fortunately, I am just as engrossed in it as I was the first time I read it but if I hadn't been, I'd simply have deleted it from my library and picked out something else.

So far, thumbs up for Scribd. 

U-S-A! U-S-A!

Source

Sunday evening was delightful. One of Husband's favorite cousins and his wife (the cousin's wife, not Husband's, although I also was...oh, never mind) were visiting Small Town from the left edge of the country and came to the House on the Corner for supper. This pair is one of my favorites among Husband's many delightful relatives, and I didn't even mind giving up my Sunday nap to direct the shoveling out of dust that accumulates when I forget to clean for a decade year while.

We had delightfully summery chicken salad, followed by delightfully delicious ice cream, and were an hour or so into a delightful catching-up conversation filled with smiles when Husband asked his cousin (who is a history professor at a liberal arts college) if he was following the World Cup. 

"To be honest," the cousin said, "I'm not a fan of soccer. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's a prime symptom of the fall of western civilization."

And just like that, the needle skidded across our delightful evening. I know that you young'uns don't even know what this refers to. Here, let me help you out:  

Husband and I gaped at delightful cousin. 

"But...but...but you're an American from the left edge of the country!" I managed to point out. "Didn't you get your kids up at 2 a.m. in 2002 to watch World Cup games because they were in Japan? Didn't you make sure you have a second monitor on your desk set to ESPN-Go so you can stream games while you grade papers?"

He did not and does not, and while the evening was still delightful, it was a bit as if we'd discovered this cousin had a shameful secret--that he doesn't like yelling goats, or he votes a straight ticket during election years. 

Yesterday, as the USA played Ghana and I consciously did not move or change activities for 83 minutes after Clint Dempsey scored that miraculous first goal (because obviously, I was helping the team with my mojo), I recalled cousin's not-so-much-a-fan proclamation. He was in my mind when I posted a status update on my Facebook page: 

If you aren't a World Cup fan, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

 

And I was thinking of that cousin as I watched Dempsey take a kick to the face and saw him KEEP PLAYING with a nose now rearranged to be a twin of W.C.Fields's schnozz, and then saw a gutsy young substitute head a ball into the goal in the dying minutes of the game for the USA win.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, COUSIN?

This morning Husband received a thank-you note, and while our guests were most complimentary about the chicken salad and ice cream, Cousin restored my faith in their humanity with this line:

 I have to confess that I got a little excited by the first American goal and the win over Ghana. 

"A little excited?" The three of us in the House on the Corner were screaming in excitement and high-fiving as enthusiastically as accountants and editors ever high-five (which is to say, trying not to miss the other hand). But if "a little excited" is the start of bringing Cousin into the World Cup cult, we'll take it.

Cousin, you may stay in the family.

An Open Letter to the Best Father I'm Married To

Husband (center, left) and the other Best Father in my life (photo, right)

Dear Husband,

I love you, and you are one of the two best fathers in the world. I love that you looked so handsome as you gave the youngest two Boys wedding advice last November. I love that you took to this fathering gig with zest and enthusiasm and all the analytical prowess with which you are naturally endowed. I love that you love the Boys and still worry about them, even though they're all grown up now and probably should be worrying about us instead.

And I love you most of all because after all these years you love the mother of your Boys, which is the absolute best trait of a good father.

I will not insult your intelligence by saying that a successful marriage is a 50-50 partnership, nor even that a successful marriage requires each partner to give 110% because such faulty mathematics would not be appealing to you. No, I believe the successful marriage requires that each partner lovingly and consistently kick in 97% to the relationship.

And because your accounting gene requires the tying out of numbers, I'm sure you are asking about the remaining three percent. The remaining three percent I reserve for the times when I have gone to bed to read while you stayed up to watch the 10 o'clock news, when you come up to our room after the sports and I have just drifted off to sleep. I need those reserves then, when you're standing beside the bed to take off your glasses and your seasonal allergies kick in and you release a sinus-clearing sonic boom of a sneeze right over my port bow.

In that exact moment when I levitate straight up out of the bed? That's where I contribute the remaining three percent. I call it my "I Will Not Murder My Husband" reserve and the fact that you have survived to celebrate Father's Day is tribute to its effectiveness.

Thank you, Husband, for being such a good father. It is a joy and an honor to give you 97%.

Just don't test that extra three percent too often, okay?

Love from the mother of your Boys,

MomQueenBee