Dodging some weather bullets.

Since we don’t watch TV here,  I tend to miss out on some of the “news” that I’m sure many of the local yokels know about.  I don’t think we’re missing much,  but it’s then not until I see something in the local rag the next day that I realise there might have been a few ‘issues’ here and there?

When it comes to the weather,  I usually take a look at the sky,  and will decide whether we need to button up or not.  Sometimes the rain comes a bit unexpectedly,   especially if there’s just a passing cloud that decides to let loose right over our heads,  even though the rest of the sky is clear.  There’s something about the rain pounding down when it’s sunny out that I find kind of mesmerising.  A bit like the way a cat might be fascinated by a dripping tap.  Except that,  I’m not about to stick my tongue out and try to get a drink.  So maybe that’s not the best analogy.

 

Over the last few days we’ve been getting late afternoon thunder showers that have helped a bit in the heat department.  It’s inevitable that “something has to give”,  when there’s so much pent up energy.   Last night’s rain came long after we went to bed,  so it was annoying to wake up to the sound of rain in the wee hours and realise I had left the chairs outside.  Even though they are “outside” chairs, we discovered early on that the darned things tend to allow little pockets of water to collect,  that then decide to come out at precisely that moment when we need an extra couple places to sit inside.  Having little puddles of water on hardwood floors doesn’t really work,  so I just always bring them in. 

 

 

It seems we’ve been kind of lucky.  There’s been some stuff happening in the weather department.  I had heard about the floods in the UK,  since they’ve been getting more than their share,  but I wasn’t quite aware of some of the craziness going on in the rest of Europe.  I’m not going to bore you with the details,  but there have been mudslides and all kinds of *fun* stuff.  Just the same though,  I still think it’s a far cry from losing your home to a forest fire.   I mean, it’s going to suck if you have that one house down by the river that gets filled with water or washed away,  but at least it’s not going to spread to your neighbours.  So when you do get back home again,  assuming you had the good sense to get out in the first place,  at least the muck can be shovelled.   Might be a little stinky, but the fumes aren’t going to asphyxiate you either.  It’s all relative.

For me anyway,  I think the threat of fire would be considerably more difficult to deal with.  There are some memories that do seem to stay with a person over the decades,  and I can recall vividly from my childhood the fear of seeing the smoke from a forest fire that was burning within a few miles of our old farm back in Nova Scotia.  We used fire in the early springtime to burn off old grass,  so fire was not something to be played with,  or fascinating in any way shape or form the way it might be to any other little kid.  That shit scared me.

 

Of course,  when I say “farm”,  I’m speaking in the broadest sense of the word, since we mostly referred to it as, “the pile of rocks”.    They didn’t call it “New Scotland” for nothing.

Ever go out and harvest rocks in the spring?  Seriously,  it was as if they grew out of the ground,  since that was another thing I do seem to recall about “farm life”.  Filling a utility trailer several times with all the rocks we had picked off the field before we could do much else.  Very hard on the hands and the back,  but even harder on the equipment.

 

The one other thing that I recall that was quite back breaking,  was picking wild blueberries.  *segue alert*  Thankfully,  there was some kind of “reward” at stake, so that was a good incentive. I don’t think I would have been at all motivated if we had been picking for someone else.  There’s really nothing quite like the intense flavour of wild blueberries.  Of course,  it’s always a good idea to scan for bears,  depending on where you are.  I don’t recall anyone mentioning that kind of thing in the Annapolis Valley.  Maybe they didn’t want to scare the bejeepers out of me?   I’ll have to ask my brother if there were bears around.  Wow,  talk about a potential for child abuse.  Made to pick blueberries,  and there might have been bears too?   And here I thought my parents we kind and loving.  Hm, better not dwell on that too much.

OK, before you get any ideas,  it wasn’t like they sent me out into the blueberry patch while they waited from the safety of the car,  with the windows rolled up.  That would have sucked.  I’m sure I would have remembered that too.  As a matter of fact,  as a young kid whose age was still in the single digits,  I don’t think I picked too damned many blueberries at all.  Probably more of a nuisance to have around than much of a help.  Let’s keep it real here if possible.

 

All we can hope to find here in Wienerland is cultivated blueberries of course,  and they’re certainly tasty enough.  Once in a while I’ll pick some up so that T.C. can have them along with some yogurt for her daily rations,  or better yet,  added in with some pancake batter…

That was Sunday’s breakfast by the way.   Pancakes with blueberries.  Once in a while I put in a request.  They were awesome.

I sort of ate the evidence before it occurred to me to maybe take a picture,  but if you’re reading this from anywhere in what we would consider to be the “civilised world”,  surely to GAWD you know what I’m talking about.  Use your imagination.  Or head off to

But I learned something.

 

 

You’d think that blueberries are blueberries,  right?   Well mostly.  The berries were all fine and dandy,  it was the cleaning end of things that was a pain in the rear.   The package from the left is from France.  The package on the right is from Austria.  For whatever reason,  and I’m not about to make any generalisations about either the French or the Austrians,  the package from France was considerably harder to get to the state where a person might actually want to consider eating the berries.   There were leaves,  twigs,  little stems.   Were they using four year old kids to pick these things? 

And this wasn’t a discovery I made on a morning when I had gobs of time to leisurely pick all the cr*p out of a sieve full of blueberries.  No,  this was a normal weekday morning,  when I really and truly can’t dawdle too flippin’ much in the lunch making department.  And no,  I’ve never been able to prepare lunch the night before.  That’s when I have even LESS desire to stand there picking over blueberries.   Or *gag* make a sandwich.  Besides,  since there’s no preservatives in the bread whatsoever here,  it has to immediately go into the freezer if it’s not getting consumed right after coming from the bakery.   So that “night before”  thing wouldn’t work anyway.

I’ve probably made you move your eyes back and forth quite enough.

 

Hopefully the weather is treating you well,  wherever you may be.

 

Thanks for popping ‘round.

 

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