So I am back in my home-country, visiting my parents out in Northern California, a land that still brims with delicious tomatoes on-the-vine and any number of other tasty summer vegetable which has long since departed from Boston where I now get my mail. (if you can’t tell already, I have been both amazed and frustrated by the lovely weather my parents get to enjoy. I called my boyfriend this afternoon and told him I might not come back after I experienced the sheer joy of plucking a Black Krim tomato off the vine in my mother’s garden and biting down… it was simply amazing.)
Anyways, this is all lovely, but the REAL reason I am writing right now is because my mother tipped me off to a delightful letter my father received this fall from none other than Sarah Palin. It’s a fundraising letter (of course) and my dad never opened it, but we did, and I have loaded it onto this post:
Take a close look at the letter–because what my mother and I noticed was that somebody needs to learn what a little something called a spellcheck is. Because if whoever they paid to write or edit this had simply clicked a button, they would have learned that “Wendnesday” is spelled “Wednesday”…. very simple, the first words at the top of the page. I have no idea how many people this got sent to, but it is a bit embarrassing, if I do say so myself.
it’s official. I have moved over to the mac side of the computer world. it feels almost strange to leave behind the PC world, but there is also a sense in which I am embarking on a new technological journey. And yes, I could go all “mac and cheesy” on my blog and write about how amazing and wonderful and gushy I feel with my new macbook, but I prefer to just note here, for posterity, that today I bit the bullet and actually got the computer that I wanted rather than one that was practical (and, somehow, I feel as though I have joined a community of bloggers here… seems like everyone has a mac these days).
Anyways, in other news, life has been pretty chill lately. I am currently in CA, most specifically for my sister’s graduation from USC, which took place with a few minor hiccups last Friday (By minor hiccups, I mean that my grandfather’s heart went out of sync for a few hours, followed closely getting a flat tire on his car when he and my grandmother picked me up at the airport–I fixed the tire by myself, btw–after which my grandmother proceeded to fall headfirst onto a slab of concrete right before my sister’s graduation and spend the day in the emergency room and then an oral surgeon’s office. Her upper lip is swollen up as a result, which makes me think of Larry the Cucumber’s song, “I love my lips” in which he spends a few weeks in what he calls ‘lip rehab’ after a tragic accident with a gate.). Any-who, despite all that the graduation went rather well, I think. My mom and brother and I had a wonderful drive back up the 5 to get back from LA to San Jose (my dad drove my grandparents back) and I have spent the days since our return reading (Lauren Winner’s “Real Sex” and Philip Gourevitch’s “We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we will be killed with our families” and part of a horridly disturbing book called “Diary of a Fat Housewife” which I do NOT recommend, even for academic purposes… I was reading it for my potential thesis topic.). I also have spent some quality time running the old trails at Alum Rock Park. I ran the South Rim Trail yesterday morning, and my legs are still feeling it!
So I have read, and I have mac-d, and I have run in the hills. But there is more….. my mother and I experimented and made loquat jam yesterday, which turned out to be an amazing success. My parents have a loquat tree, you see, and it was loaded with brightish fruit that was aching to be used. So my mother and I determined that we had the time and interest (sort of) to devote to utilizing the tree’s bounty. The following photos represent the transformation, from tree to bottle.
so many loquats…
Loquat Soup–an intermediate stage
the final, delicious product
Ultimately, the jam was quite tasty, similar in many respects to marmalade. I plan on bringing some, along with my mother’s apricot jam from the fall, back to Boston/Philadelphia with me… (btw if you want some let me know! There is a bunch to spare!)
Lastly, in the interests of experimentation and a virtually endless loquat supply, I tried my hand at drying some of the little suckers today. They have so far been in the dryer for about 4 hours, along with blood-orange, lemon, and apple slices. I look forward to the results.
I guess my conclusion here is that it has been a restful week. I have caught up on sleep, finally gotten around to exercising again, found myself in my parents home and back in my home congregation for a weekend, and begun to recover from the semester. Not bad, I say.
Deeper in me than I 