It has been a while since the last blog, the wood stove was still in function, ma's have come and gone, gutters are still running.  It is 4 am and I can't sleep, so for my peace of mind I am making another digital turd that I can smell again when I have grown old.   And what is keeping me awake? Them berries.  Terrible, Syria is falling apart and I can't sleep because of berries.  Justin can't sleep either but I'll get to that.   Got me some songs stuck in my head, proceed at own risk.  I think you can click a music link and read at the same time, just like I could be weeding and picking at the same time.

So it has been getting out of hand, one day you are excited about the first strawberry in the high tunnel, then the first pound, and you cherish that and one day you hap hazzardly walk into the strawberry patch outside and you realize that yes, you were looking at a teddy bear in a tunnel and you have BIGFOOT outside, a true Frankensteinian monster, HELP.
The berries in the tunnel are a nice 2 calorie appetizer to an all you can eat hardees burpfest.  And overnight, with no warning there they are.  Like you go to Hermann to get groceries and all of a sudden there is a roadblock and they ask for your passport in a foreign language.  WTF?  Was I sleeping at the wheel, did the country shrink, is there a time warp around my mailbox? Where did those strawberries come from, and how come they turn to mush when you don't pick em in the 15 minutes that they are at their peak of amazingness?  Because truly they are amazingly delicious and like nothing you buy in the store.  I said that after I ate the first 3 pounds at least, but it still holds true, I think.  Also, these here are not sprayed and I googled it and a substantial percentage of conventional strawberry weight is made up of extremely dense herbicidal molecules.  See: http://shitimakeup/tomakemypoint.com for further documentation of this fact.
So here we are: growing food is not the same as feed, feed you can store in a grain bin, food you got to move, and pick by hand.  LFS (lucky fucker syndrome) kicked in, again, and I found an outlet for berries that are picked but not sold the same day. Endlessummerwinery in Big Spring, is a small winery that makes wine out of anything but grapes.  They have apple wine, pear wine, jalopeno wine and this summer they will have ......
yes, you guessed it right: STRAWBERRY wine.  So, not only did I find an outlet for 910 lb of berries, Justin and friends showed up to pick em!  Talk about LFS squared!  So picking, then washing, and then freezing till we get to 900, and really don't forget the 10. 
To keep it all going smooth I invested in some music: below is new Dutch pride.  This woman is the bomb, as is her music, makes anything you do in the field more enjoyable.  She and I have the same birthday, just another useless factoid that I will carry around the rest of my life, while I am looking endlessly for my wallet.

Ma 's came and ma's left, April 26th, on my birthday.  By the way did I tell you Caro and I have the same birthday?
Going to a party with ma and stepma, both been married to my dad for 17+ years, but not at the same time.  In a sense it makes sense that ma's get along, after all they have shared the same guy, some time. "Oh, how nice that is your mother, and who is the other lady?" Like Steve Wood says: normal is just a setting on the dryer. But tell me, how many people can have their ma's over for 4 weeks and will be truly sad when they leave, and yes, I was breastfed.

I have been touching a lot of money lately, nothing that sticks to my bow though.  In the cashbox, out the cashbox, Of course the book keeping is non existent.  Trying to keep track of it is like grabbing an eel in a bucket of snot.   To get at least some indication I once in a while weigh the cash box.
The egg situation is strange too, we are getting about 13 dozen a day, that makes for 80 dozen a week, after breaking some, the ones that are too dirty to wash, some for the dogs and some to shampoo my hair with for that shiny Brad Pitt look.  But those 80 dozen really disappear every week!  Some to the Captain Wohlt B and B (Nice folks and really cool setting and one of the most beautiful outside stone stairs around), some to Black Bear Bakery in St. Louis (your one of a kind cooperative bakery on the corner of Cherokee and Jefferson), some to somewhere, and some at the pavilion where people have been getting the hang of the honor system which involves aforementioned cash box. People like that honor system, some kind of semblance of old fashioned trust from a bygone era. 
 
This just in: Justin, the picking machine, on his quest to 910, or is it 911?
Will he survive?  He has been picking non stop for 2 days now and last evening he saw the ghost of Gloria Gainor in row seven .  At first he was afraid then he was petrified.

I wonder if circles are the same throughout the universe.  The diameter times 3.141529 etc is the circumference of the circle.  The number Pi is an irrational number, it does not have a recurring theme of digits, they are ever changing.  Apparently therefore you cannot square a circle that is, define a square that has the same area as a circle.  
So at the food circle at the Mercantile in McKittrick....  Dan, the alternative energy goeroe buys stuff from the milk lady, (milk actually),  she pays me for the eggs for that week, I buy some tomatoes from a vendor who gets them from the Amish,  the vendor buys some things from Pieter's Pantry, and I invest the money in a book from Dan.  Almost could have left my wallet at home. 
Nice meeting, again.  Amy gave a presentation on alternative diets and it was remarkable how much we all are involved and have views on food.