Attacked by a blackberry bush!
Okay, first: does anybody (other than my betas, who are probably sick of this story by now) feel like doing a review/DVD commentary of my BigBang fic? I'm going to be re-posting it to my LJ and my site tomorrow, I think, so any volunteers can get more info out of me then. Y'know, if there are any. :) ( Official-type information can be found here.)
Anyway. Blackberry bush. I mean, I kind of started it. I put on my wellies and the roomie and I went out with a bucket to divest the bushes of as many of their berries as we could get without being mauled.
In the rain - yes. Because they'll stop growing and start rotting soon, and because it wasn't cold, just wet, and anyway this was a Genuine British Columbia Experience and I'm always trying to educate the roomie in Our Ways. You pick blackberries in the rain, and there are no bees. Besides, if you're born here, you have a sort of shield that keeps you from getting quite as wet as other people. (True fact. Ask any non-southwestern-British-Columbian who's ever walked down a rainy street with a British Columbian.)
I still got mauled a little. My arms got a little scraped up. The most common kind of blackberry bush in Greater Vancouver is an invasive species, much meaner and pokier and more stubborn than the indigeous variety. It's in one's best interest to inflict as much damage as possible to the bush when picking berries, so that the monstrosity does not eventually consume one's house, and this creates an understandably adversarial relationship.
The roomie is not as experienced as I am at subduing blackberry bushes (kind of a Hammond urchin thing), and hung back helpfully holding the bucket while I stomped stripped vines (with blackberries is it a vine or a cane or a branch? I just know they're sharp) into the ground with my rubber boots and tugged still-growing ones of the tender leafy variety out of the way, while next to us the creek got louder and louder.
Mum demanded a 4L ice cream bucket full as payment for helping us move, and we got nearly a whole bucket. Would've got more if I had a machete. There's only so much subduing you can do with a Himalayan blackberry bush and no sharp knives or even thick gloves. Rather it's a lot of very delicate untangling-of vines and stomping and worming one's way veryverycarefully deeper into the bush. Got only about halfway, and then we were both too soaking wet to continue, so came in to have supper.
Supper was Chilliwack corn and potato salad. We had the same meal with Superstore corn, but I think it was from Washington and therefore far inferior. Somebody brought two huge bags of corn to work today and so I availed myself of a couple of ears. (Took out the compost for the first time today, too. Really laughably excited about having my very own compost. Going to have to take it out again tomorrow, as the shucked-parts of the corn have filled up the bucket already.)
Mum's set the date for Dad's wake as September 6th. I believe it's going to be a fairly casual affair - which in my family means a liberal helping of alcohol and lots of embarrassing stories about my parents in high school. A lot of Dad's fans will be coming; we held the wake back for as long as we did because Harncon is this weekend, so if you'll be about and you feel particularly inclined to dropping by, please do. Food welcome. Booze welcomer. Mum's partial to Irish cream of any variety, and I like being distracted from eighty middle-aged tabletop RPers who idolised my father like unto a god and want to know what I'm going to be doing with the game. Did I mention I'm supposed to go to a meeting this Thursday? *hides*
Which reminds me - I've still got the footage from Mum and Dad's Oz/New Zealand trip last year and I've been thinking about cutting some for the wake. Now if I could only remember where I packed it, so I could unpack it...
Further Eee updates: I think I'm going to upgrade the RAM on this thing to 2GB - the internets tell me this will solve the majority of my conflict/lagging problems. Beginning to kind of understand some of the commands in command line, and let me just say, OMG guys, Linux is hard. And I'm starting to agree with people about Xandros being the work of the devil. It works just fine as it comes, but try and change it and it starts getting really bitchy. Unfortunately I do not know enough about Linux yet to fix it properly, so I'm doing it one tiny bit at a time. RAM upgrades? BIOS updates? That I know how to do. I will start with that.
Anyway. Blackberry bush. I mean, I kind of started it. I put on my wellies and the roomie and I went out with a bucket to divest the bushes of as many of their berries as we could get without being mauled.
In the rain - yes. Because they'll stop growing and start rotting soon, and because it wasn't cold, just wet, and anyway this was a Genuine British Columbia Experience and I'm always trying to educate the roomie in Our Ways. You pick blackberries in the rain, and there are no bees. Besides, if you're born here, you have a sort of shield that keeps you from getting quite as wet as other people. (True fact. Ask any non-southwestern-British-Columbian who's ever walked down a rainy street with a British Columbian.)
I still got mauled a little. My arms got a little scraped up. The most common kind of blackberry bush in Greater Vancouver is an invasive species, much meaner and pokier and more stubborn than the indigeous variety. It's in one's best interest to inflict as much damage as possible to the bush when picking berries, so that the monstrosity does not eventually consume one's house, and this creates an understandably adversarial relationship.
The roomie is not as experienced as I am at subduing blackberry bushes (kind of a Hammond urchin thing), and hung back helpfully holding the bucket while I stomped stripped vines (with blackberries is it a vine or a cane or a branch? I just know they're sharp) into the ground with my rubber boots and tugged still-growing ones of the tender leafy variety out of the way, while next to us the creek got louder and louder.
Mum demanded a 4L ice cream bucket full as payment for helping us move, and we got nearly a whole bucket. Would've got more if I had a machete. There's only so much subduing you can do with a Himalayan blackberry bush and no sharp knives or even thick gloves. Rather it's a lot of very delicate untangling-of vines and stomping and worming one's way veryverycarefully deeper into the bush. Got only about halfway, and then we were both too soaking wet to continue, so came in to have supper.
Supper was Chilliwack corn and potato salad. We had the same meal with Superstore corn, but I think it was from Washington and therefore far inferior. Somebody brought two huge bags of corn to work today and so I availed myself of a couple of ears. (Took out the compost for the first time today, too. Really laughably excited about having my very own compost. Going to have to take it out again tomorrow, as the shucked-parts of the corn have filled up the bucket already.)
Mum's set the date for Dad's wake as September 6th. I believe it's going to be a fairly casual affair - which in my family means a liberal helping of alcohol and lots of embarrassing stories about my parents in high school. A lot of Dad's fans will be coming; we held the wake back for as long as we did because Harncon is this weekend, so if you'll be about and you feel particularly inclined to dropping by, please do. Food welcome. Booze welcomer. Mum's partial to Irish cream of any variety, and I like being distracted from eighty middle-aged tabletop RPers who idolised my father like unto a god and want to know what I'm going to be doing with the game. Did I mention I'm supposed to go to a meeting this Thursday? *hides*
Which reminds me - I've still got the footage from Mum and Dad's Oz/New Zealand trip last year and I've been thinking about cutting some for the wake. Now if I could only remember where I packed it, so I could unpack it...
Further Eee updates: I think I'm going to upgrade the RAM on this thing to 2GB - the internets tell me this will solve the majority of my conflict/lagging problems. Beginning to kind of understand some of the commands in command line, and let me just say, OMG guys, Linux is hard. And I'm starting to agree with people about Xandros being the work of the devil. It works just fine as it comes, but try and change it and it starts getting really bitchy. Unfortunately I do not know enough about Linux yet to fix it properly, so I'm doing it one tiny bit at a time. RAM upgrades? BIOS updates? That I know how to do. I will start with that.