sprang forward, thinking about the mighty mighty paw paw
Listening to: | Pat Benatar and Neil Geraldo acoustic! |
Reading: | Beer |
Weather: | 40, overcast, smells like spring, birdies sing |
I almost never stay up at home past midnight. So why in the fuckin world do I end up staying up past midnight on the night we freakin turn the clocks forward?!!? Oy, this brain o'mine.
Anyhoo, I'm pretty stoked for the end of winter, and it got to nearly 60 yesterday! I wandered around the back 40, loppers in hand, nuking the occasional multiflora rose and blackberry cane. I've ordered a few trees and plan to plant them up above my house in the meadow that I only cut back every so often. Last winter the snow was so high and heavy it had a pretty good killing effect on lots of multiflora rose, so I just wandered up there and easily pulled them out of the ground during this muddy season. Not quite as easy this year, but I'm going after it.
Delightful hour of Pat Benatar and husband guitar player Neil Geraldo doing it up acoustic this morning on some cable channel. Sweeeet. Neil is really an unsung guitar player, in my book. Listen to those arrangements and leads from back in the day, that guy is tasty ripping rock behind the big pipes of little cutie Pat B. She's the bomb.
I'm thinking about wild food again, cooking up plans to go to a bunch of wild food fests, perhaps to include the Paw Paw Festival in Lake Snowden, OH. My friends Kelly and Deanna are involved with this fest and they say it's amazingly fun times. They are paw paw evangelists. I'm totally down with the fruit, as well, and plan to have a few paw paw trees in my orchard one o'these days. I saved seeds last year, shoulda planted them in the fall but didn't, so maybe I'll stick them in the freezer and see if I can get them to germinate this spring later. Either than or get them planted this fall. My friend George Lively planted seed in his yard and got actual fruit in just a few years, Sweeeeeeeet!
Also planning to his the rampfest in Mason Dixon Park near Mount Morris, PA. There are many rampfests, but this one is so close I might as well hit it. I have a notion to put together some kind of wild food hunting project through my job, since it's the old folks who have the badass knowledge in this arena. Don't have a good legal angle on it to legitimize me getting into it, but I'm a-workin on it! Maybe create a WV wild food hunting info and cookbook for a fundraiser? Cruise around to the county senior centers interviewing seniors about wild foods and how to cook them. Oh. Hell. Yes.
I'm not a big vodka drinker. I have a indelible memory of one nasty episode of a bottle of vodka, a bunch of orange juice, and an ex-boyfriend. Nice guy, no probs there, just for some reason we drank the whole bottle and I spent the morning seeking the coolness of the porcelain on my cheek wishing and hoping I would puke. But I'm not a puker, never have been, haven't tossed my cookies in literally decades, and when I use the word literally I mean frickin literally. So I just suffered with a wicked headache and bellyache, probably the belly was mostly from the OJ rather than the vodka, but that taste of vodka birds roosting in my mouth the next morning can't be separated from the whole outcome. So I turned to the brown liquors thereafter.
But these girly flavored vodkas intrigued me, especially after I followed the recommendation of my college pal Spud last year and tried Firefly Sweet Tea Vodka. Lawd. Ice and a slice of lemon and you are suddenly surprisingly shitfaced. So delicious.
Then a couple weeks ago Larry's sister Liz pulled a bottle of Godiva Chocolate Vodka out of her freezer and poured shots. Amazingly smooth and chocolatey but not terribly sweet, to my surprise. Really good stuff. So I picked up a bottle and shared some with the girls last weekend after Larry's dad's funeral.
Larry's dad died just a couple days after we last visited him. Surprising. He had certainly declined fast mentally, seemed confused and disturbed, but I never would have expected he would die days later. So it turned out to be good we visited when we did. I will miss the old guy, who made it to 94. What a life, very long, very interesting, mostly pretty good, I think. You can't live forever, and he had lost a lot, his home, his ability to walk, was losing his hearing and apparently his mental capacity. But it still sucks to die and it sucks to have a friend or family member die. I'll definitely miss him, I miss him already, actually.
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posted by cat 10:04 AM