Sanna's Bag

“I never seem to have what I need when I need it. I’m going to make a belt-bag that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside, and just carry everything with me.”

Thursday, August 21, 2008

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.)

13 Comments:

  • At 5:30 PM , Blogger Kate said...

    Well done you! I remember hitting 10% (both on the way down and on the way up again!) when I was doing WW. Actually, I'm contemplating doing the program again. I'm the same weight I was before I was pregnant but that was still more than I should be. I don't want Til to have a mum who's too tired/lethargic from carrying lard to play properly with her as she gets older. And Lord knows, that weight just has the most amazing stealth abilities in creeping back on!

     
  • At 9:35 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

    Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 90% of Roxie is 200% splendiferous!

    I'm doing my best to follow your lead -- keep inspiring us. xxx

     
  • At 9:52 PM , Blogger Galad said...

    I love sampling honey and have always preferred it to jams and jelly. My daughter in law is the real honey expert though and has tried many different types. What a wonderful place to find!

     
  • At 3:29 AM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

    CONGRATULATIONS on the WW goals! That's fantastic.
    As for the honey, did you really think that the flowers and flavors thing was just marketing? That just makes me smile for some reason. :)

     
  • At 3:47 AM , Blogger Janette said...

    You Go Girl!!!

    Congrats on the weight loss. If I can do it, anyone can. I'm still gorgeous and thin and intend staying that way.

    Don't you simply love the new bod!

    Looking forward to those model shots.

    J xx

     
  • At 8:43 AM , Blogger Amy Lane said...

    So much to comment on! The honey thing was awesome--I love that it's the honor system, and I love that you can get lavendar honey! The jet thing was reassuring. I knew that 72 degrees was optimal living temperature. @#@$%$ing California summers.

    And the new job hoops? Hate those. Probably why I've been here so damned long!!!

     
  • At 8:51 AM , Blogger Amy Lane said...

    OH yes--and congratulations (double and triple!) on your 10%!!! *sigh* I can't even remember what I ate at this point...I'm going to have to be large and in charge for another year, I think.

     
  • At 11:14 AM , Blogger Alwen said...

    My dad has kept bees on and off since I was a kid, so yeahhhh, mmm, flavors of honey. Here we get blueberry (blossom) honey.

    And I have a part-time cleaning job (which includes toilets!), but since it's in banks, I had to pass the background check to get it.

    I'm sure they don't care about the calculus or the 1001 plant names I can still rattle off.

     
  • At 1:07 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

    About the honor-system honey vendor....street address please!
    Back in the hippy day we used to buy honey by the gallon at the late lamented Corno's.Buckwheat - dark and smoky, was totally different from fireweed - light, bright, a bit citrusy. Then there was alfafa, more clover-like than clover, and blackberry blossom...
    Orange blossom is excellent and distinctive.I use it to glaze those little Provencal cookies flavored with orange flower water and studded with pinenuts, also great with various middle-eastern phyllo confections. Best ever in my tasting, a tin of mixed wildflower I brought back from Greece.Tasted like the slopes at Delphi smelled.

    Actually, assuming the new rules stand, it is no longer going to be easy to get an Oregon Driver's License. But yah, it was.

     
  • At 6:36 PM , Blogger Willow said...

    Interesting that you talk about how easy it is to get an Oregon DL. I was telling my daughter that it's easier than in CA and people who need ID the easy way go up to OR, get the DL or and ID card, come back across the border to CA and flash their OR ID/DL. I'm glad that's going to change. And my cousin who is a DMV director (anonymous counties to protect his identity) will be happy.

    We have gotten our honey from our friends' ranch. They've changed from lemons to blueberries, so I wonder how the taste of the honey will change.

    Congrats on the 10% weight change. I'm almost envious enough to start back up again trying to lose mine.

    Are you going to my old county to do the GED testings?

     
  • At 2:29 PM , Blogger Sharon Rose said...

    Oooooh I miss PacNW honey!!! Can't wait to get back... I answered your kilt question on my blog in the comments. :)

     
  • At 5:43 PM , Blogger Warrior Knitter said...

    CONTRATS!!! on your loss!!!

    We buy local honey by the 3 lb jar. We don't go though much in the summer but when it begins to get cooler, we go seem to go through tanker trucks of hot tea a pot at a time. A dipper of honey in a favorite large mug is just right. We can buy local honey at our grocery store but once in a while we'll score at a farmer's market, too.

     
  • At 11:20 PM , Blogger the boogeyman's wife said...

    a honey tasting sounds like tons of fun!

     

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