OHhhKAy...

It's not tomorrow. That would have been Friday but here it the continuation of "More later". I have just been rather busy. But tomorrow, one might expect a spoiler free Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix movie reveiw, oh yes they might!
I drove out to lovely, lovely hood river and picked cherries. I picked rather less cherries than I had planned because; one, it was in the 90's and therefore very hot and two, picking cherries is hard work. It involves a precipitously tall latter with one skinny little leg to balance the ladder portion of the whole contraption. Tripods are, in fact, the most stable set of legs one can have, and therefore, this is a very effective way to build a ladder. However, it looks more precarious than one would wish it to. You must ascend this ladder with a harness bearing a kidney beanish shaped bucket, a picker bucket. This harness and bucket set up leaves your hands free to climb ungangly ladders and pick persnickety cherries.

YES! cherries are persnickety. You see if you want the cherries to last, to not rot, mold or anything, the stem must remain on the cherry. A ripe cherry will happily disengage it's stem, but the stem will not so happy disengage the tree limb you are attempting to rend it from. Cherries grow in bunches with their stems firmly attached to the tree. So when attempting to remove a cherry or three and their stems, it is more like than not, the cherries will fall to the ground and you will have nothing. SO apparently, you rip the WHOLE bunch off the tree limb, there is a node from which all the stems protrude that will detach from the tree limb with care, leaving you a nice bunch of cherries you can then carefully remove stem by stem.
You do all this while not letting tree limbs snap at you or away from you and not falling out of the tree.
I got to 8 lbs. and had quite enough thank you. True, they are 1.50 a lb, but they are also 1 1/2 hours away up a tree in 90 degree heat where they are more than happy to stay, thank you very much. So I think maybe the 2$ a pound you can find them for at markets or some such, is more than reasonable.
It is very fine jam however. And a tasty fruit snack too.

Oh so cherries, yes, and adventure. I might do it again, if it was with other people and not 90 degrees out.
So then I went for a hike. It took a bit of hunting to find the trailhead I was hoping to tackle, but find it i did. By then it was 5 pm and peeerrfect weather for hiking. I loved it. I had the trail more or less to myself, unlike the conditions on the Multnomah Falls trail down the road which was swamped with people. I saw waterfalls and plants and pikas and it was just marvelous. I <3 the nature.

Then Thursday , the marvelous Lady J and I went out to Savuie island for more berries. We need more berries? We'll not any more I think... well, I donno, can you ever have too many berries in season? This is a serious thought problem folks. So we picked berries, raspberries, marionberries and blueberries. bushels. ok maybe just flats. A lot. ok?!

And then I made more jam. I now have a larder of jam and a freezer half full of berries. I am a bear. Grrr. I am hording them away for winter.

Then I got a new vacuum. All I have to say is, thank the vacuum gods for that. Uh, or our jobs. Whichever, the old vacuum was a lemon. Eureka Altimas look like a good deal, BUT THEY AREN'T. I am now the proud owner of a Bissel Lift-Off Revolution Pet. That is a long worded way of saying the Bissel version of the Dyson Animal for fraction of the cost. It's wonderful o have a clean floor again. it practically looks like we had the rugs cleaned.

End of story.