picking stuff

I've had a lot of time on my hands recently. This is not about idleness; on the contrary, today was productive and I was glad not to work. My bank account, however, would beg to differ.

My friend Sara and I happened to run into each other after work on Sunday and decided to get a quick drink and catch up. We've been meaning to hang out for ages, but one or the both of us always winds up busy. The chance meeting encouraged us to make firm plans for this week, so we decided we'd meet up today. She's very DIY and has mad skills in the kitchen and with handicrafts, so we generally have loads to talk about. She suggested we go berry picking since a few berries are in season and the wooded areas around Vancouver are full of bushes. I'm also a fan of urban foraging, liking the idea of collecting public resources that would otherwise rot. Sara mentioned that the parks board has talked about planting apple trees in parks and I totally support public apple trees.

Because I no longer have a U-Pass and because I had a hair appointment on Granville in the late afternoon, I chose walking around UBC over trekking to North Vancouver (will save that trip for August). We organised stuff for lunch, met up at Main and headed toward the endowment lands. From the bus Sara could see thimble berries, one of her favourite wild berries, so we wandered along the road to pick what we could see. She noticed a cherry tree, so we picked as many as we could reach (which wasn't a very good amount, sadly. Note to self: grow another 4 feet to reach the upper branches) and were lured into the woods by spots of red on shrubs. A mountainous berry that looks like a small blackberry (not blackberries because they're still flowering) and salmon berries caught my eye and I added as many as I could find. These are almost out of season, so my haul was small. We found a few thimble berries, but not many more than a few to eat; they're pretty tasty considering they're so small. Since huckleberries are fully in season, we decided to concentrate on those.

We walked around for a while and stopped at a grassy area just outside the park to have lunch. Cheese, bread, fruit, vegetables (are olives considered a vegetable?) and mugi cha made for a perfect picnic lunch and sustained us for the rest of the afternoon. Our focus shifted to which direction to go to maximise our huckleberry gathering.


Sara is much more of an expert, having picked urban huckleberries before. I've only ever picked mountain huckleberries by force when I was a child on camping trips with my family. It was fun for a while, but we often couldn't leave the area until we each had a 4L ice cream bucket of berries. It was hard work. I'm used to dark blue/purple huckleberries; these were shades of red. We stuck close to the path and picked what we saw, but hit a choice thatch about an hour before we had to leave. I managed to pick three cups of berries with moderate effort and Sara got way more than me. The effort will hopefully be rewarded by huckleberry muffins, huckleberry cheesecake or something else that I have no idea how to make yet, but will discover somehow. The berries are in my freezer.

My haircut is hard to see right now. I was more concerned with getting my colour straightened out and that looks pretty good, I think. I can't tell because this particular cut is meant to highlight curly hair, so my hair is really curly right now. I think the colour looks better, but will have to wait for a few days. I love getting haircuts, even if I'm not immediately sure about how I feel about my hair. My fake sister-in-law does my hair and is fantastic at what she does; the highlight for me is the scalp massage and I would let her do pretty much anything to my hair for one of those. Actually, I do let her do pretty much anything she wants to my hair as it is.