We've been making more saft. Lots more. I've got eight pints of berries in the fridge right now, waiting to be boiled down and sugared. We did an all-strawberry batch, which I thought would be nice and affordable compared to the raspberry-rich version we did the first time, but it turns out that strawberries don't yield much juice. The all-blueberry batch we did most recently was by far my favorite. The syrup came out a really nice rich indigo color, and it tasted like a subtle version of blueberry pie.Other than a few ongoing projects--the saft; a quilt I'm working on; the record-player-holder Stephen's building--things have been quiet lately. I had a paper due last week and a 13+ hour workday that sapped my energy. I tried to get up the momentum to go to see the El Greco to Velazquez show at the MFA on Sunday, but it started raining so I napped instead. So easy to sleep when you're trying to read on a drizzly day, especially if you're doing so while lying in bed in your pajamas. In undergrad, I used to fall asleep so consistently while trying to do reading for class that I eventually started using class readings as a cure for insomnia on the rare nights when I couldn't get to sleep. That's never been much of a problem for me, though. I almost always fall asleep the second my head hits the pillow.
I've gotten much better at not falling asleep during movies, though. I used to fall asleep almost every time we watched TV or a movie at home, and sometimes in the theater, too. Maybe I'm watching better movies now? We saw The Fall last night with Stephen's dad and brother. The storytelling was so rich and the visuals so lush, it made me wish that all movies had such a strong creative vision. From IMDb:In a hospital on the outskirts of 1920s Los Angeles, an injured stuntman begins to tell a fellow patient, a little girl with a broken arm, a fantastical story about 5 mythical heroes. Thanks to his fractured state of mind and her vivid imagination, the line between fiction and reality starts to blur as the tale advances.
It's crazy, but in a good way.
I've been watching less TV lately, now that Lost and The Office are on break. What's left but The Simpsons? Mostly I watch offbeat reality shows from Netflix. We saw 1940s House last week, which really opened my eyes about life in Britain during WWII. It's hard to imagine people coming together in the same way now, sacrificing things and growing their own food to support the troops (and to keep themselves from starving). Did you know that SPAM was invented by the US as a means of efficiently transporting meat rations to the British before America joined the war? SPAM stands for Specially Processed American Meats. Better living through chemistry, right?
