Save The Peanut People

 I almost feel guilty.  (Almost.)  The rest of the world is suffering the sudden effects of global warming and me, I'm enjoying life here in the 4th Corner.  So are my fellow  Bellinghamsters. 

We even have our own mug.  And yes, that's the official town motto.  

Yup. I know.

It is downright comfortable out!  And sunny! People are out actually doing things besides going to brew pubs.  They're having garage sales and letting the kids stay up and splash in the sprinklers, walking dogs, working in their yards, visiting up and down the street.  And I have been out among them!

It has been so temperate, in fact, that the local blackberries have come on like monsters, growing out over the street overnight in some places. It makes me homesick for Oregon, where the blackberry patches ruled. They got so big you could walk underneath them!  As kids we'd take in a broomhandle and rattle it up above in the canopy and the blackberries would tumble down, all warm from the sunshine above. This was more fun if you were four feet tall and didn't mind being covered in splattered blackberries, of course.

I live on a bluff overlooking Puget Sound, and every bird in creation has been planting blackberries on the edge of that bluff since the first Native American chased a wooly mammoth here.  So off I went - less than a mile away! - and picked a gallon or more of blackberries yesterday.   It only took me twenty minutes to fill the bucket!  And all the while I had a beautiful view of the estuary of the Nooksack River going out into Puget Sound, the emerald green marshes and all the lacy creeks and rills running through it and out across the tidelands toward the bay. I spent more time examining bumblebees and watching herons fly across the water below than I did picking berries, naturally.

Long story short, made a blackberry pie, and four blackberry tarts!  But I had blackberries left over.  Hmm.  So I tinted an old white t-shirt with them.

Now I'm going to dye my hair. 

With blackberries.  

Yup.

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GOOBER GRAPE (that's what they'll be calling me)

I cannot believe people actually used to eat this. Stripes of grape jelly and stripes of peanut butter running lengthwise was squirted into the jar, and made for a novel sight on the grocery shelf . But when you'd go to kids houses and they'd offer you some, the whole inside of the jar had already been shlorped around with a butterknife and looked like a horrible catastrophe had happened and all the peanut people were dissolving from a purple disease. 

When the going gets tough, God makes you eat stuff like peanut butter and grape jelly or perhaps sauerkraut that's full of caraway seeds, and you have to tough that out.  If you don't, you won't go to Heaven. At least not the good Heaven.  You'll have to go to Bargain Heaven and you don't get wings there. You get a scooter.

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I DID NOT DYE MY HAIR WITH BLACKBERRIES SO HA

I was too busy drinking animal beer in the sauna.     

See, I was smart for once. I've gone pure white at the temples, like a Horror Host, which I adore.  I left well enough alone - and do not want a bright purple scalp.  No.  Tempting as that sounds.

The t-shirt was more than enough warning.  A once-white shirt went from a deep red-purple, before washing, to something you'd find in a shallow grave in the woods. 

This is how you get impregnated by a ghost, I'm pretty sure.

Not only did it turn myn shirt wet newspaper grey, it picked up ever hidden stain and just sank its teeth in.  I had no idea my detergent was that shitty! So that's something I learned - switch to a better brand.

Yes it's been a hectic swing through space and time here at the el Apartmento. Whatchooz been doing, dime?