Clogged Pipes and other Artsy Things

Well, I had wanted to be the first post of July, but I guess it's my own fault that this is not the case...

I have been enjoying a relative lack of activity, but not a great enough lack to prevent me from having way too much to write about in one little (or possibly not quite so little) blog post. In light of this, my news shall be less creatively written and substantially more to the point than originally intended, yet still convoluted enough to result in happy little contusions of the brain!

1. A friend of mine from way back when in homeschooling elementary is going to be coming to MIT as a transfer student next year, so my mother and I had lunch with her and her mother so they could ask us lots of questions. It was fun. We are going to be flying to Boston on the same plane come end of August, and she will stay with me for a day or two until she can check into her room. She's awesome and I hope you all get to meet her sometime :)

2. I went to my cousin's bridal shower last weekend. Pretty dang entertaining, and exciting for her!

3. After much searching, I managed to track down my old French teacher. I painstakingly wrote and proofread an email in my best French, and she wrote back YAY this means a lot to me because she was rather inspiring to me... also because prior to this I thought she had disappeared off the face of the earth.


Okay, enough of the list for now, I don't want to extend it too far and become dry and chalky (and by chalky I meant to say boring). I have recently had a hankering to explore my artistic side. The first manifestation of this common condition was sketching, and not the kind in which I'm supposed to be taking lessons from Ashley ;)

This is probably the best of my masterpieces so far.

I took a picture instead of scanning it, so it doesn't show the details at all, but you'll just have to get the general idea...
Also, Elizabeth, and I mean this in the least creepy way possible, you have really adorable lips.


And now begins the part of the blog that will be somewhat in the style of Davie, in the sense that I will be talking about nature.

I have been helping out at the unfinished house recently, and one of my jobs is to help clear trails so we can continue to walk without obstruction. In my breaks I have been discovering wonderful plants and taking pictures.

Let us start with potential noms...

Mmmm, hazelnuts, filberts, whatever you call them, maybe someday someone will discover the secret of homemade nutella.
Also, I saw one tree that had the nuts growing in clusters of 4 instead of 2, weird...

Next, BERRIES.

We have lots of berries. I have pictures of many of the plants, but I'm impatient and it takes a long time to upload pictures, so maybe you'll have to see some of them another time. We have huckleberries galore. We also have salal, which produces very mild berries that are a lot like blueberries, but with skin that's kind of fuzzy like a peach.

And then there are the blackberries. There are 3 kinds of blackberry growing in our area, Himalayan, Trailing, and Evergreen, and they're very easy to tell apart.

Most of us are familiar with Himalayan blackberries: Red thorny stems, big berries, grow like bushes, take over everything, and if you'll notice, they have 5 leaves per cluster or at least 5 distinct leaflet points depending on the age of the stalk.

Trailing blackberries have a slightly lower profile. They grow as vines along the ground or through the undergrowth and have smaller, more flavorful berries. They also have green stems and only 3 leaves per cluster.


Lastly, there are the Evergreen blackberries. We don't have as many of these, so I've never actually tasted one, but they are still my favorites. They just look cool. Yeah, I'm sure you get the trend but that's one to the right there.

I have also discovered that it's incredibly difficult to take a picture of a bumblebee, got a few, but mainly I'm still working on that one.

Oh gosh, this is turning a bit long-winded, but I'm relying on the pretty pictures to keep you all interested. One last thing! Friday night I went with the fam to the Drive-In to see Green Lantern and X-men. It was a great time. There aren't many left these days and I feel lucky to have one close by.

Of course, it's a little different than it used to be. Instead of speakers sticking up here and there you just tune your radio to a station that only exists within a short distance of the "theater"and enjoy. The one we go to has 3 screens, and this is the smallest (the giant screen was playing Transformers 3 this weekend, no surprise there). Anyway, if you ever get the chance to go, don't miss it, it's a one-of-a-kind experience :)

So, I've still left out a bunch of things, but that will have to do for now. It will be a good reason to write again soon. A very happy 4th of July to all of you, whether you're in a place that celebrates it or not, and keep on posting!

P.S. Our kitchen sink was plugged up when I started writing this.