Before I get to the main part of this post, let me just be up front and say that any discussions of knitting are going to be few and far between for the next couple of weeks. First, this is the time of year I mentally refer to as "dead time," because for as long as I have been in this business. NOTHING happens in August. NOTHING—no orders, no forum discussions in Ravelry, NOTHING. Second, there isn't much knitting happening here, although the afghan is on the needles and I am working on it when I have time. Third, it's just too darn hot to think about knitting right now.

I do have a few more patterns to release, but they are fall patterns and I want to wait until people are thinking about fall knitting.

Okay, now that I have lowered the bar, let's talk about what HAS been happening. The husband and I have entered foraging mode. Foraging is when we find out who around here has orchards they don't pick, or orchards they've abandoned, and we get permission to go pick. Last year we got more apples than we knew what to do with using this method. On Saturday night we took ladders to an abandoned orchard and picked a bucket of sour cherries and a couple of gallons of sweet cherries. That same orchard has an apple tree that is just loaded, and I am hoping it's a tree full of Yellow Transparents or Lodi or some other great pie apple. I usually buy my pie apples but I'd be more than happy to pick them myself this year. We'll know in another couple of weeks.

The sour cherries became pies yesterday, although—in a spectacular display of what the husband calls "doing many things badly at the same time" and I call "multitasking"—I managed to leave the sugar out of one pie (not good) and burn another one (also not good). The pie that survived my cooking debacle was pronounced "excellent" by quality control (I didn't eat any).

Last night, DD#1 helped me can 17 pints of sweet cherries for cherry sauce—a very versatile sauce that can be used in cherry crisp, poured over ice cream, or used as a topping for cheescake.

[The only problem with this time of the year is that an abundance of food means that abundance of food has to be processed. The husband has been great about helping with that—he picked and hulled all the strawberries and got them into the freezer, he's picked and frozen all the peas, and he was so fascinated by the cherry pitter that he pitted most of the cherries for me. But the actual canning (and pie-making) is usually done by me. Fortunately, I have a big kitchen.]

Sunday night, I was struck with the notion that we should go huckleberry picking. Do you know of huckleberries? They are a major part of cuisine here in the northwest. Huckleberries are sort of akin to blueberries (I was once caught in the crossfire of a heated discussion of the huckleberry's righful place on the botanical spectrum and I don't really want to be subject to that again, so let's just say that they are "sort of akin to blueberries" and leave it at that). I can tell you, though, that they don't really taste like blueberries, and once you've had huckleberries you're kind of spoiled. I would rather have huckleberries than just about anything else for dessert, even chocolate (but I would happily take both together).

Huckleberries, alas, have not been successfully domesticated, as have blueberries. Huckleberries demand some sort of strange combination of light, shade, soil, charcoal, water, dryness, and phases of the moon to make them happy. They like areas that have been clearcut or burnt over, I know that much. I know how to find them in the woods—what combination of signs to look for to find them (kind of like hunting morels in the spring), but it's always a crapshoot and that is part of the charm. It's also part of the charm that it's entirely possible to run into bears while picking huckleberries because bears are not stupid and they like them as much as we do. That's why I take the husband with me.

On Sunday night, the husband and DD#1 and I headed out to the woods to some spots I thought would be good for picking. Alas, DD#1 forgot to take her allergy meds, and by the time we got to the huckleberries, she was miserable. We headed back. We found some loaded bushes close to home, though, so we sent her on home and stayed until dark to pick. As we walked home along the edge of our property, I thought to check the few bushes that I knew were there and have been since the day we bought this place. They were full of berries. The husband said that was sort of like hiking 3 miles to shoot a deer, then hauling it home and finding one standing in the yard.

I went out to that spot again yesterday morning and picked it clean. I was delighted to discover that—because the husband cleared this area out two years ago to make it more wildfire-resistant—there are hundreds of little baby huckleberry plants growing in there. We have our own little huckleberry thicket right on our property, and in another year or two we should be able to pick a couple of gallons without leaving the yard! It's not exactly a cultivated plot, but I'll take it!

Then the husband joined me and we spent two hours in the woods in a spot where all we had to do was sit down and pick whatever was within arm's reach, like a couple of lazy grizzly bears. We went out again last night and tried to find more, but we had to bushwhack through some heavy brush, and while the husband finds that energizing, I do not. I told him we could go out again later in the week when the berries a little higher up will be ripening. We can do that for the next couple of weeks, although the further it gets into August, the higher up in altitude we have to go to find ripe berries.

So we have four gallons of huckleberries in our fridge, and when you consider that a gallon of huckleberries typically sells for about $40 a gallon, that is not a bad day's work. I'm going to make them into jam today. The husband says he expects the jam to have the same life expectancy here at our house as that of deer jerky, which is usually gone within a week of bringing it home from the processor. I pointed out that we are well within our rights to declare that only the people who pick get to partake. In huckleberries, as in love and war, all's fair.

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The transcription job search is moving along, but more slowly than I would like. I had hoped to be working by now. I've had interest from a couple of companies, but nothing definite. Last week I bought a Windows computer. Those of you who know me know that there are VERY FEW things that could make me work on a Windows machine. Entering a field that is fairly hostile to Macs is one of them. Even though I have a Mac that can be (and has been) booted into Windows, I decided that the easier thing would be to buy a Windows machine and another desk and devote the Windows machine solely to transcription work. I think that's a good solution. I spent a few hours Saturday going through the training for one company that uses a specific program, but I haven't heard back from them yet. That's the thing about this job search—a lot of companies pre-screen by making applicants take fairly extensive proficiency exams, presumably to weed out those who aren't competent or can't learn new software. But it's time-consuming and it comes with no guarantee of a job.

I also prefer to work as an independent contractor rather than an employee. I don't need or want benefits—because I had cancer 17 years ago, I have to stay on the health insurance policy I am on or I run the risk of forever after being uninsurable (yes, I know, companies aren't going to be allowed to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions, but there is nothing that says they can't charge exhorbitant premiums to cover you). And IC positions are usually more flexible in terms of time. But I would take an employee position in order to get some experience.