say something sweet

On Saturday, we ran out of honey. I had gotten a gallon of honey at Costco lo these manymany moons ago, and for months we have been chiseling crystals out of the bottom of the jug because the sucker is too big to fit into the microwave and there's a limit to my patience for heating the stuff in a big pot of water on the stove. But on Saturday, I finished off the last of it and was trying to convince myself to buy one of those wildly expensive squeezy bears at Safeway. You know, the plastic bear full of honey with an incongruous yellow cap where the honey squirts out? I hate to pay sooo much for it when you know the profits all go to middlemen. Anyhooo, DH had spotted a sign in the neighborhood reading "Honey ->" so we followed the arrows and wound up down a quiet side-street with the final arrow ppointing to a cupboard next to a garage.
"How good can this be?" I asked myself, supremely unimpressed by the utter suburban low-keyness of it all.

We got out of the car and opened the cupboard. It was like opening a jewel chest! There were shelves and shelves of pint jars filled with liquid amber, arranged neatly on spotless white shelf paper. The jars held lables like, "Fireweed" and "Lavender" and "Roses" There were quart jars holing chunks of comb swimming in golden suspension. There were clear plastic tubs with sheets of honeycomb - each little capsule of sweetness hermetically sealed and untouched by human hands. There were pie-plate sized disks of beeswax, yellow as crayons and oh, so fragrant. And on the bottom shelf were half-pint jars containing honey mixed with berry juice. Raspberry and blackberry and blueberry . . . And, drat the luck, we hadn't expected to need cash. So we got two pints of honey and plan on making a return trip soon! (It's on the honor system. You just slide the payment through the mail slot!)

I always thought the notion that the flowers influenced the taste of the honey was a fluffy sort of marketing fairytale. Doggone, I was WRONG! Lavender honey tastes distinctly different from wildflower honey. For the next knitting gathering that I host, we are having scones with a great big honey sampler!

The fun thing we did on Sunday was to tour the local Boeing plant. A dear friend of DH works there and they were having an open house, so he invited us. DH, being a machinist, had a ball. I just wandered around in awe. They have drills and mils and lathes that are the size of trailer houses. An ingot of metal goes in one end and at the other end, a single-piece wing strut emerges in mirror-bright glory. Or a landing-gear brace. Or - a fricking huge mysterious part of a jet plane. And they work with such close tolerances that they have to keep the plant at a constant 72 degrees so that the expansion or contraction of the metal doesn't change the size of the part of the placement of the slots and holes. And the assembly plant where the planes are put together has to be kept at 72 degrees as well, or the parts won't fit. I assure you, your airplane will not randomly come apart in mid air. Aside from all the welds and bolts and rivets, simple friction of such closely fitted parts should get you safely down to earth. They have seperate plumbing systems for each different kind of coolant, and they recycle all the bits and chips and scrapings they take off those ingots to shape the shiney, shiney parts. I was wayyy impressed!!

Hey, guess what else is impressive? I finally hit my 10% with weight watchers. I have lost 10% of what I weighed when I started. Yayyyy me! Guys, that was 19.8 pounds! In fact, I have made it to 21.2 pounds lost. Whoop, whoop!! I'm headed for 160, down from almost 200, so I'm more than half way there. Great big green salads are my friends!!

Blogger and I are again having fights. No pictures today, but at least I got on. Sorry I have been so erratic.

I filed the applications for the temporary job. It takes an hour to drive out to the new place. And the hoops to jump through - my God, you need a college degree to apply for a position as toilet cleaner. Well, OK, my situation is complicated by the fact that I will be working for one department, directed by another, and paid through a third. I'm replacing someone who is out on medical leave, may or may not return, and never let anyone else mess with her work. No one is quite sure exactly what she did or how she did it. And there are the college hoops, the GED hoops, and the jail hoops. Tomorrow I jump through the jail hoops, and I will be done and ready to start on Thursday.

In Oregon, it's easy for anyone to get a driver's license, so if you want a job with any sort of security clearance (As in handling paperwork containing people's ss#, names and addresses) you need to have multiple pieces of identification to prove you really are who you say you are. I didn't have adequate info with me on the first trip, so I had to drive back today, an hour out, an hour back, and fifteen minutes of showing my passport, birth certificate and Social Security card to augment my driver's license. See. This is me. Now they have to run a background check on me. Wonder if they'll find I'm an award-winning poet? Wonder if they'll care? (Just little awards, but right there if you google me.)