Oddments

The squirrel follies seem to be in ratings week this morning. To visualize this properly, you have to know that my deck (off the 2nd floor kitchen) has a railing about waist high with posts that rise to about head-height (the builder was planning to trim them to just above the railing but I said to leave them in case I wanted to use them as an anchor for something else at some point ... but I digress) with a variety of trees snugging up next to the railing on the other side. So I'm sitting having breakfast right next to one of the posts when there comes a violent rustling in one of the trees at the other end of the deck and suddenly a squirrel pops out onto the deck floor. Just about nose-to-nose with a very interested cat. The squirrel does one of those teleportation things up onto the deck railing and runs like mad ... straight at me. Says me to squirrel, "Did you really want to do that?" Squirrel teleports to top of post and we have a brief and amicable stare-off. Squirrel then does a backflip into the apple tree and scampers off. Cat stares longingly.

Another squirrel (or maybe the same one) is currently sitting in the birch tree, just in tantalizing distance from the cat, nibbling on seed-thingies. Another is checking the ripeness of the green almonds in one of the almond trees. I haven't quite figured out whether the squirrels actually find unripe almonds nutritious or whether they just nibble at them reflexively all through the season out of habit.

I day-tripped to Crown Tourney yesterday and did the butterfly thing -- if I take a chair, then I'm much too inclined to plunk it down and stay in one place, and one of the benefits of daytripping is doing a lot of circulating and talking to different people. That I did in abundance. Saw the brothers and all the usual suspects. In addition to general schmoozing, I offered the leftover games booklets from the Games Tourney to the Princess, since she's very interested in promoting games in general and she was delighted to take them off my hands to pass out. I've been drooling over acanthusleaf's jewelry for quite a while, but nothing had ever quite grabbed me by the throat, although I was quite enamored of the little "hat jewels" she makes and had talked a bit about maybe getting something in that line. Well, I've also mentioned to her in the past that I'm quite fond of emeralds (#1 they're green; #2 they're my birthstone) -- not necessarily the top-quality ones, but I quite like the low-grade ones as well. And she has kept pointing out that they're enough more expensive than the usual run of stones she uses (e.g., in the garnet range of prices) that they're hard to sell. Well, this time she pulls out a little box with four small round emeralds -- just perfect for the corners of a hat-jewel -- and they grabbed me by the throat. So it'll have a square garnet in the center and a pearl drop. Now I need to think about what sort of 12th night dress would go well with it.

In the end, I decided to bug out before evening court, since it was shaping up to be long and late as usual and the peerages that I knew and cared about had been taken care of earlier in the day. So I even got home before dark and got a rather good nights sleep ... interruped only somewhat by vivid dreams of hordes of cockroaches in my house. Not sure what that's a metaphor for.

If there are ants, can raspberries be far behind?

Every year there is the cosmic dilemma of whether we can hold out against calling the exterminator for the ants until after the raspberries have all ripened. If it were just me, I'd deal with the ants by getting fanatical about keeping the food and garbage inaccessible, but as a landlady I can't really get away with telling the tenants to do that. I do, however, hold out for not spreading poisons around the foundations of the house until I'm done with berry season. Summer weather brings out both abundances, with the ants usually leading slightly. I've been moving the cat's wet-food dish regularly for the past several weeks to keep the pests away, and then today I went out to set up the sprinkler and found nearly a quart of berries waiting for me. And as a bonus: my two cherries were ripe (and un-bird-eaten!). This is, I believe, a doubling of my last cherry crop. Next year, if I really manage to get the neighbor's trees pruned back to the fence, the cherry may get enough sun to go to town. The boysenberries and black raspberries are getting ripe too, but I let them be for now. I didn't get down on hands and knees to check for strawberries yet. I don't get enough strawberries to stop me from buying them at the store, but somehow I can never bring myself to pay money for raspberries and blackberries -- and the anticipation only makes them sweeter.

IKEA was having a big sale this weekend and I've been thinking about getting a new bedstead -- one that actually has a headboard so I can sit up in bed if I want to. But none of the items I've had my eye on were on sale, so I let that slide for the moment. I did get some containers I've been meaning to experiment with for a new SCA camp kitchen design. (I am forever designing the next version of the SCA camp kitchen, with a steady cycle of elaboration and simplification.) More on this project later if it looks like it's going to work.