Oh, the blackberries I picked today! Don’t even try to imagine it, because you can’t. What’s that? You can’t help but try? Oh alright – well then imagine me, Janet, Brian and Dominic driving out to Abbotsford, passing Kraus Brothers Farms and having to turn around at the Yarrow exit, driving back, and signs where the ‘O’s were made to look like berries, and therefor were darker than the other letters so that from far away they seemed to spell SHIRTCAKE. Imagine also sneaking into the strawberry patch, and the hot sun beating down on us, and planes in formation passing overhead as part of the Abbotsford Air Show, and my SHREK popcorn bucket (free with combo at Capitol 6) filling up quickly with plump blackberries. Imagine me going through Janet’s entire oven pot of berries to get a little white spider out.
Now that you’re finished imagining all of that, imagine Ted Danson wearing a too-large phallic, animatronic capybara hat designed by Henson Studios, canoeing around and around a backyard swimming pool filled with blood.
On our trip, we learned a valuable lesson about trying to fit four people and several bucketfuls of berries into Brian’s exterminator truck. The lesson was: don’t. Especially when it’s really hot out and especially especially you’re driving more than a few blocks of clear traffic. For the curious among you, the trip to Vancouver from Abbotsford on a Sunday evening during the Abbotsford Airshow constitutes more than a few blocks of clear traffic. It constitutes legions of blocks of congested traffic. Yvonne’s ear-congested.
Speaking of ear, prior to all of this berrydactyl madness, we went to the Congee House on Broadway & Main for breakfast/lunch, which I call lunkfast, and there we met up with Yvonne and Tynan and had some exotic foodstuffs which you can read about on Y’s blog. The 1000-year old egg was touted as dire, but in fact it was not too bad. It was just like regular (duck) egg, but with more alarming textures and colours. And I had congee for the first time. It truly was like rice porridge, which I’m sure I would love as much as Yvonne if in fact I was a big fan of porridge or cream of wheat or tapioca or rice. As it is I am only a moderately-sized fan of all of those (perhaps more so of rice).
On Ursula’s advice I have purchased bananas and juice for the construction of some blackberry smoothies a little later.