Saturday

A drama in 3 acts.

Act I: making applesauce with friends.























Act II: an unexpected discovery at the bead store.

I stopped in to look for a mountain climber charm to top off a clock Dale made commemorating my friend and colleage Damian; what they had instead was a fossil shark tooth!



Act III: Fuck.

Opened my email for the first time today. An old friend, who I thought was making a good recovery in hospital, just entered hospice.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

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Autumn brunch

So I've been spending quite a bit of weekend time at the house of the PI for the bear reproductive biology project, working on potential publications, and it's a nice place to work--a right place for right livelihood.

We've had some nice brunches before and during the writing sessions. I stopped by the store to get some fresh vegetables on the way, and the atmosphere is very autumnal:



I couldn't decide whether I liked that tomato in the bottom right of the frame, but I certainly noticed it--it looked like the movie Alien if Veggie Tales had produced (ha!) it:



It did say something to me, although I'm not sure quite what; in the end, I decided to go a different route. I already had blueberries and Italian plums that Emma had invited me to pick in her garden; noticing an unfamiliar fruit--a tamarillo from New Zealand--I decided to get one to try at brunch:



In the end, it was a good thing that I only got one--not sure what she experienced it as, but to me, it tasted like kiwi meets tomato meets mango meets soap. We finished all the other fruit, but not the tamarillo.

Fortunately, she knows some gorillas who love all kinds of fruit, so it turned out not to be wasted.

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Katydids?

Please do not adjust your screen. The problem is not in your computer.

(It's that my camera isn't suited for macrophotography. One of these days, I'll get one with a macro lens, especially as the invertebrate and phyto worlds pull me ever closer inward.)

Emma's fruit garden yielded a lot of currants this year, and I got quite a lot for making jams this winter. One thing led to another, and it was a week or so after I picked them that I got around to cleaning and freezing them.

When I pulled the currants out of the fridge, two corpses were discovered:



Like I said, it's a really crappy photo, but I couldn't seem to get a clearer one--pulling back a little led to weird reflections off the bowl. But maybe this is enough to confirm or rule out the guess that they may be katydids.

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