Eight New Things Learned in June

1. Mulberries are SWEET. Some friends brought a bowl to church to share, and they were so sweet that my teeth almost started humming.
2. A gabion basket is a wire mesh cube, perhaps 4x4x4 feet. It gets filled with rocks, and then it serves as a solid piece to built up a road bed or shoulder.
3. A Foley fork, also called granny fork or a blending fork (because “Foley” is a brand name) is an old-fashioned kitchen tool that some people just cannot be without. There is interesting info about it on this website, called The Baking Wizard. (Nope, I don’t want one—simply found it interesting.)
4. There is an entire subculture of foragers, with a website called “Falling Fruit“, which maps where there is free stuff for the picking all over the world! The Central Valley’s flyover status is confirmed in that although we feed the world, we do not appear on that map (unless it gets greatly enlarged and you locate an orange or fig tree overlapping a sidewalk in Fresno). I love to glean walnuts and citrus from friends’ groves, have occasionally picked Miner’s Lettuce to add to salads, wished to find the wild berries along the Mineral King Road (but never stopped to look), picked elderberries for jelly, and never hesitated to ask someone with a pomegranate tree if they had extra. Foraging in public spaces in a city sounds very bold.
5. The price of flat screen televisions has dropped significantly. However, there is catch: you have to pay someone techie to hook it up and teach you how to operate it. (If it was up to me, I would not own one.) Furthermore, there is no way to get rid of “non-smart” teevees. No one wants or needs them, even if they work. (The cable company said it was the teevee, but it turned out to be their cable box that got fried in the 2 power outages and restarts.)
6. A friend who participates in 12-step programs told me about a list of questions for consideration that she received in one of her meetings. The question that grabbed my attention is one that we all need to ask ourselves in many situations: Why am I talking? (I once heard Rush say “Before you pick up your phone and dial this show, ask yourself the question ‘Does anyone care?'”)
7. There is a monastery in Dubuque, Iowa, where the monks make caskets. This sounds like a weird thing to learn, but the caskets are beautiful. They provide free caskets to people who have lost a child, and they do not accept orders online, only over the phone. They are called “Trappist Caskets“. I hope none of you need this information anytime soon, but it is an undeniable truth of life that none of us will leave this planet alive (unless Jesus raptures us outta here.)
8. Have you ever heard of terramation? This is a new alternative to cremation also called “human composting, a process whereby your body is turned into compost and then spread in your garden. It is legal in five states and you can read about it here.

Well. Alrighty then. Ahem. This had a bit too much morbidity. What does it mean? 

Why am I talking?? 

Over and out.