#35 Volleyball, raspberries, & jury duty

Olympics.  Women's beach volleyball.  Ok, I can understand that sand underfoot is a requirement of the sport.  But bikinis??? 

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Picked red raspberries (and more "bloodberries", which this week Greig Farm is calling blackberries) yesterday with a friend.  When she arrived, she looked really pretty, all buttermilk and sparkle.  I asked what she had done different, and she said that she wasn't wearing any makeup.  Life is so unfair!  For the past 40 years, whenever I've gone somewhere without makeup, people ask me what's wrong - I look ill, or tired, or unhappy.  She looks radiant!   

The raspberry field was full of bees of every size and shape.  It sounded like the inside of a hive.  But there was no danger - the bees were very busy and very happy, and not at all worried about us.

Raspberries are low payoff picking.  On each cane there will be new flower buds, a very  few that are pickable now, and some that are way past prime, and no matter when you go, today, tomorrow, or next week, the proportion of ripe ones stays the same, so there's no best time to pick.  You go through a lot of canes looking for the ripe ones.  My comment was that there are past, present, and future berries, and as time goes on, the past gets larger and the future gets smaller, but the present stays the same.  It was only today that I realized that's a profound thought.

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A few entries back, I complained that I felt invisible because I don't get political missives, and don't get called for jury duty.  What I didn't know was that at that very moment, a jury duty notice was sitting in the van, unnoticed. 

I'd picked up the mail one day, and instead of putting it on the passenger seat to go into the house, I had put it in a box in the back (probably because there was some messy junk on the seat), and then forgot it.  Found it last week. There was a card that had to be sent in.  It didn't have a due date, just "within x days", and I had no idea how long it had been sitting there.  You could check "I'll come in and wait" or "I'll be home and come in on one hour notice".  So I checked "one hour notice".  I may have screwed up, because if the traffic is bad, it will take me more than an hour to get to the jury room in Poughkeepsie.   

So anyway, I am on jury duty this week.  I have to call in to a tape every evening to see if I'm on call for the next day.  I think maybe when my number comes up for the next day, I'll just go on in.  Easier on the nerves.  I'll take a book so the day won't be wasted.