I've three half-pints of serviceberry-mulberry jam burbling away on the back of the stove. It's going to be lovely, lovely jam -- it came right together with very little sugar and no pectin at all. I added a splash of balsamic vinegar because I wasn't happy with its acidity level, and it turned out to be the perfect touch, adding just a little bit of tartness where there was only sweet before, and rounding out some nice taste notes in the middle. I cooked it in my big enameled pot, which had the syrup reduced in a flash and cleaned up like a dream.
Trivia, though the Canadians among you will probably shake your heads at my ignorance: These berries -- among their many names, including "shadbush" and "Juneberry" -- are also known as "Saskatoons", from the Cree word misâskwatômina (/misaaskwatoomina/). The city in Saskatchewan takes its name from the bush.
And now you know.
I had a really nice crop of strawberries coming in this year -- a bumper crop, even, despite the tiny space -- and I've now lost over half of them to this awful fungus called Leather Rot. It's particularly nasty because the majority of berries go straight from green to rotten, and those ripe berries that develop the rot have to be chucked entirely because even when you cut away the bad bits the healthy remainder tastes gross. So I picked and tossed out over a quart of berries, and picked several others half-ripe because it's better to have half an almost-ripe berry than no berry at all. Bummer.
On the other hand, the park across the street has a lovely serviceberry bush, and the fruit is ripe and sweet, with seeds that taste of amaretto. So tomorrow I'm going to harvest the park and make jam. Maybe with some rhubarb to give it a little tart kick.
The last week or so has been full of many happy moments (well, past the events of last Monday, anyway), most of which are too small to merit their own blog post, but are worth mentioning:
Yup, life is good.
Hey everybody. I had a Highly Embarrassing Medical Procedure performed on me this morning. If you're not up to reading about it, or have a conservative workplace, you're probably not going to want to read any further. HOw embarrassing? So much so that my mom asked me not to blog about it. Tough noogies, mom. This is what the internets are for. I'll give the more squeamish among you some whitespace so you can click away now.
Okay, still here? Good.
Today I had a colonoscopy!
I got to go through this lovely experience because my family has a pretty bad history of colon cancer, and it's starting to get to be that time in my life where early tests make all the difference for a happy life later on. Like most of the commiseration reports I'd read, the previous day's "cleanout" was by far the worst part of the procedure. All day Sunday I got nothing solid to eat, and subsisted on Knox gelatin made with apple juice, ginger ale, iced tea and chicken broth drunk straight from the can. O dignity! I remember you!
The first round of overnight laxatives was so harsh that I had to check the bowl to make sure I hadn't shat out something important. Like my pancreas. In fact, just about the only thing that kept me willing to continue the process was thinking about all the high-larious things I would be blogging about after it was all over. Like, "Hey, so *that's* where my car keys went!" and "Lookit that -- the penny I swallowed when I was six!" and "I guess my friends can't say I'm full of shit anymore!"
Yipes. And that was only the first round. The second and third consisted of this horriffic stuff called Phospho soda, which works by drawing water from all over your body and forcing it into your colon. The result is that you basically get a rear-action firehose for ten hours straight, and never get to be away from the bathroom for more than a half-hour at a time. Fun for the whole family! Actually, based on some other accounts, I got off easy; I only had to drink two 6-oz glasses of the stuff. There's an alternative that requires drinking a gallon of salty electrolyte fluid to achieve the same result.
Either way, this morning I was gut-bustingly, nightmarishly, squeaky clean. We arrived at 6:45 am (early appointment == no fasting on the second day) and I specifically requested the Really Good Drugs. They offer to let you stay awake through the procedure and watch your innards on a little color screen, but I decided early on (in an extreme reversal from my usual how-things-work nerdery) that I wanted to be good and stoned. To quote Carla, until they add a little animated gnome in goggles and a hazmat suit, I'd prefer to avoid the show.
Adding to today's fun was the fact that I have never been admitted to a hospital before, and I was more than a little anxious about the whole thing. So I get the awful stupid robe, the nurses finally get my IV started, and then they give me some nice heated blankies to help me relax, which was actually a pretty nice touch. They wheel me in, and I meet the staff that's going to be taking care of me, and then they start the Really Good Drugs through my IV. It was really weird: I was focusing on all the stuff I could see from there on my side, and thinking to myself, hey, I don't feel this taking effect. I opened my mouth, and as I was getting ready to tell them that I needed more sedation, they announced that I was all done and ready to go into the recovery area. Over just like that. YAY DRUGS.
The extra good news is that they found nothing of consequence, and I don't have to have this wonderful procedure done again for another ten years! The bad news is that Jimmy Hoffa is still missing.
Sorry I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, but there's been a reason for the quiet -- I've got a new job! I didn't want to post anything until I knew for sure that I had it locked down, and even then I was afraid to say anything until I'd received a formal offer letter and submitted my letter of resignation to my former employer. But! Everything is squared away now, so I can finally talk about it with people other than Paul.
It's a really great company, with all sorts of wonderful benefits (including being able to bike to work forever and ever!) and all the people I know who work there are crazy smart and super cool. It's going to be a tough job and a ton of work but I'm really looking forward to the challenge and am eager to get back into web design. I didn't realize how much I missed it until I was away for so long.
So! I start on June 30th -- which is a nice coincidence as it marks the one-year anniversary of my layoff from my job at CareerSite. Hooray!