Fidget

I made freezer jam out of my blueberries. It came out yummy! The pectin package, which has detailed instructions for making many kinds of jam, emphatically warned me that I shouldn’t mess with the fruit-to-sugar ratio or else my jam wouldn’t jell. But, seeing that they called for 4 cups of fruit, 7 cups of sugar, and a cup of corn syrup to prevent sugar crystals… I decided to mess with it anyway. I used 2 cups of sugar with my 4 cups of coarsely pureed blueberries, and my jam came out fine. It’s quite firm, too, it just has a lot of runny juice along with it. So it’s not so great for peanut butter sandwiches, though if you eat ‘em right away it’s OK. But excellent for other purposes such as a topping for pancakes or yogurt or ice cream or…

Even though my freezer was already laden with frozen whole blueberries, 3 jam jars and 4 yogurt cups full of jam, I decided to go blueberry picking again as I’d been invited by the K’s - GK and her daughters, M and A. Another friend, CO, came too. This time, the weather wasn’t nearly so hot, it was quite a cloudy day. The berry bushes were wilder, bushier, and more tangled. But, get this - the blueberries were twice as big as the ones I’d picked before, and those were big, too. Wow. I tried to restrain myself and not pick too many, because I’d run out of freezer space if I came back with another 6+ pounds of berries!

Team Blueberry

Gotta pick ‘em all!

Victory!

Aren’t they Bluetiful?

Left: normal-sized berry. Right: GI-NORMOUS berry. Told ya.

Today is our anniversary. BN and I have been married for 3 years now.

To celebrate, we took a little getaway to the Oregon coast this past weekend. We drove to Heceta Head and ate our picnic lunch. The day was pleasant and sunny, but a bit on the windy side. After we ate we took a brief hike up to the lighthouse.

We took a leisurely drive the rest of the way up to Newport, where we checked into our Room with a View:

As you might notice from the picture, Agate Beach is a bit unusual in that it is all carved in very low dunes. The sand is super-fine, and anywhere there is a patch of moisture the wind has carved fascinating shapes, miniature sculpted cliffs, bluffs, and columns, like the gem on the left, only a few inches tall.

After we’d played on the beach and shaken off most of the sand that had been blown into our hair, ears, etc - we went out for dinner in Newport’s Historic Bayfront. That sounds fancy but it’s mostly funky little shops and narrow streets with big murals of whales on the old industrial buildings. We got back to our room just in time to catch the tail end of the sunset:

Even after it was totally dark, we got a view of a few fireworks from the crest of the hill to the right of the hotel.

On Sunday we took our time and stopped at several places along the way back down the coast. Most notably was this spot where we wandered among “tide-cliffs” - you’ve heard of tide-pools, well, the tide was so low that we were walking on flat sand all around these masses of rocks with all kinds of barnacles and sea anemones covering the walls. I’ve never seen so many starfish, all clustered together trying to stay wet and out of the sun.

What a lovely excursion. Even though we were only away one night, we felt that we’d maximized our time, spending almost two full days doing what we do best: exploring and relaxing, keeping each other company.

Guess what? I got a bike. Actually, BN got it for me - he purchased it on the 4th of July, and all would be well except the reason that he was in the market for bikes at all is for the very unfortunate reason that:

His bike was stolen. It happened a week or so ago - and no, it wasn’t that he forgot to lock it up or parked it in some forsaken spot. Somebody just cut the lock, took it from the bike rack right there on campus, in the mid-morning. Can you believe it?! Eugene is seriously the bike theft capital of the world. Well, officially, it’s in the top 6 US cities with worst bike theft. And it’s the only one of the 6 that isn’t a major urban center. We have a bike registration system that’s obviously not working. Apparently the deterrents aren’t strong enough to keep people from making money stealing bikes and reselling them on Craig’s List. It’s a crying shame. BN got his bike, practically for free, secondhand from his stepbrother. So under other circumstances, I’d say, if he’s getting a new bike we should splurge on a really nice one. But here it’s hard to get excited about purchasing an expensive bike that could be randomly stolen at any time!

So, BN’s in the market for a decent second-hand bike. Hopefully he’ll find one soon so he’ll be able to begin riding to school again. Also he’s going to need to give me remedial bike-riding lessons because I haven’t ridden a bike since I was a teeny tiny teenager.

One issue is that we live on top of a hill. So going down is scary (for me, a cautious re-beginner) cause it’s so steep, and coming back up is intimidating because you pretty much have to walk it. Otherwise, I’d be stoked on my new greener lifestyle - I can ride to the grocery stores, the copy shop, the bank, the yarn store, the post office, the church, the ladies’ lunch, my friends GC or LL… Think of all the gas I’ll save. Except for the hill issue. Well, I’ll keep you posted. Next time you see me I may have hugely oversized calf muscles from pumpin it up the hill all the time on my new purple mountain bike.

I feel like a real Oregonian now. I have been blueberry-picking!

CG and her daughter A had invited me to go pick strawberries a few weeks ago, but we kind of missed the window for strawberry season (at least locally - they are still shipping them in from Watsonville to the market.) So, we planned to pick blueberries on the 5th. It was so fun! We got an early start because we knew it was going to be another hot day - felt like it was in the 90’s later in the day, but it wasn’t too bad at 10 am. We were told that it took about 20 minutes to fill a bucket, so we each took 2. (They weigh the full buckets and subtract the weight of the container - $1.50 a pound - what a steal!!!) CG’s mom, MS, came too and the four of us headed out to the rows of blueberry bushes. It was so nice and tidy - there was soft grass growing between the rows and it was easy to reach berries on any part of the bushes.

30 minutes later, we were wondering why our buckets weren’t even half full yet. We figured it was because we were eating so many. AG said she was starting to feel full, in fact. All the same, she filled her bucket first. Maybe being 8 she had an advantage not having to lean down to reach the lower parts of the bushes. The rest of us agreed, the blueberries were so good we couldn’t stop eating them. It’s not prohibited to “graze” while you pick, but we were joking all the same that we were eating more than we were taking home. Finally our buckets were full (just one bucket each, as it turned out) and we slowly wandered back to the edge of the (what do you call it? field? orchard?) patch, plucking a few last berries as we walked. MS, chewing meditatively, said, “You know what they ought to do… is weigh us.”

Well, I ran the Butte-to-Butte 10K again this year. I was a little anxious, because I really didn’t train as well as I had last year. But I really wanted to beat my previous time. I had done a 4+ mile run, the last mile uphill, a week or so ago and I felt good at that point. But I hadn’t run 6.2 miles since last year!

It was a lot hotter this year, too… whew!

But… my bib number was 7. How lucky is that? It’s my lucky year, after all, a 7lb-7oz baby born in 1977!

The race felt tougher, some combination of being less trained, hotter, and pushing myself a lot harder. But I did it - my finish time was 1:04:33. That’s a 10.4 minute pace, a whole minute per mile faster than last year! Woo-hoo!

Note to self: don’t try to go out to breakfast on race day. I had to wait what felt like several hours for my egg-topped-bagel breakfast and as BN can tell you, I’m quite the cranky camper when I’m starving!

I felt a little better after I ate, but after my shower all I could do for the rest of the day was lie helplessly on the couch. I was so, so, tired! I’ve never felt so exhausted. It was like a concentrated exhaustion, different from how I felt after 52 hours of being in-the-air-on-the-road in transit to Nepal. Different from how I felt after hiking in the High Sierras all day with BN. My mind wasn’t exhausted, but my body felt like it didn’t want to move.

I did manage to make buffalo burgers with sweet potato ‘fries’ for our 4th of July dinner. They turned out yummy!

After that we drove up a back road and walked a little ways (fortified by red meat) to a somewhat tree-blocked but fairly good view of South Eugene. Everybody and their brother was setting off fireworks, all over town, many seemed larger than legal. Also the minor-league baseball stadium had a medium-sized show that we could see.

I didn’t think of the Northwest as a cherry hub. But apparently it’s a significant crop. I got a big bag of Bings from the grocery store and have been enjoying them all week, sliced and stirred into yogurt with honey and granola. It’s like dessert for breakfast!

We even have a cherry tree behind our apartment. It is huge, it towers above our second-story home. There must be bushels of cherries, but they are almost all out of reach, high above our heads. They rain down, from the time they are hard and green and not more than a pit on a stem until now when they are ripe and squishy, and coat the deck and invade our potted plants. Messy!

This is the first year I’ve tried eating them. They are actually not bad… Maybe I expected them to be very sour, but they aren’t. I wouldn’t call them sweet, either, and they are very different from the ones from the grocery store - they are pale pinkish-yellow with a rosy glow on one side. Quite pretty, really. Lately I’ve just been stepping out on the deck and grabbing a few from low-hanging branches.

A few weeks ago, from our bedroom window, we observed an ambitious raccoon climbing in the cherry tree. I was very surprised when I saw a large blurry animal (I was not wearing my glasses) and, since it was way too big to be a squirrel, my first impulse was that it was a cat. Nope… I could vaguely discern a very stripy tail and BN, with his superior vision, confirmed that yes, it was indeed a raccoon. Maybe it was that extreme-sports raccoon that braved the frozen pool this winter. It’s crazy how high that little guy climbed, since he was above our second floor window! I didn’t even know raccoons could climb trees. And it was full daylight.