Strawberry picking
Avery and I joined Christie and Henry for some strawberry picking this morning. It was a lovely morning and we easily filled up a large box with red strawberries. Most of them even hulled themselves since they were at the perfect moment of ripeness. My only plan for these strawberries is to make fruit leather. I've never made fruit leather, but I got it in my mind a while ago that I should (I like from a post or a share done by Lori). So off I went to pick a box of berries. I got home, took a nap with Avery, then went about washing and sorting the berries. By the time that process was done, I realized I would only be able to do part of the fruit leather process (date night tonight). I learned a few things during this process. Shall I share? Yes? OK.
- I don't like making fruit leather. It's much easier to buy a box and unwrap the nicely packaged and perfectly prepared rolls.
- When a pot of strawberries and water is put on the stove to simmer, covered, and left unattended, it will boil over and make the range look like a bloody crime was committed above it.
- When strawberry puree is put into a blender, holding the lid down tightly is key if you want to avoid strawberries all over the wall and cabinets and your shirt.
- Walls and cabinets clean up fairly easily; shirts, not so much.
- 12 cups of strawberries yields three cookie sheets of fruit leather.
- I picked about 36-48 cups of strawberries.
- This fruit leather better be light years better than the boxed kind or I'm gonna be pissed.
Movies and Books
I'm still reading the Ender's Game series of books. I'm on book three now, Xenocide: Volume Three of the Ender Quartet. If you'd told me even a few months ago that I'd be working my way through a sci-fi series, or that D and I would be reading them at the same time, I'd have thought you were crazy.
I wanted a way to rate the movies I see, then post them to FB the same way the Goodreads site does for books. That is how I stumbled upon criticker.com. It's a cool site that creates a PSI - probability score indicator - for a movie based on your previous ratings. Basically, after you've rated x movies, it compares those ratings to other users who also rated those movies. Using aggregated data from all users, it can then create a PSI for each movie you have not rated, which tells you what you will likely rate that movie. After I entered about 100 movies, I started to pay attention to the PSI it predicted for me before I ranked a movie. It was surprisingly accurate, I must say. Especially because it's on a scale of 0 to 100. They seem to have gotten around the obvious problem of comparing one user to another user (that being what one user considers to be a score of 90 might be another user's 80) by essentially comparing movies based on a curve. It categorizes the movies you've rated into tiers, then compares tiers to tiers. Clever.
It was that obsessive rating that resulted in my 1:30 am bedtimelast nightthis morning. I regretted it in the morning, but I do feel like I accomplished yet another meaningless data task and those are my favorite types of meaningless tasks.
Weekend plans
Saturday morning we're planning to go miniature golfing. Sort of an early father's day celebration. Saturday afternoon we're heading to a neighbor's house for a BBQ/play date with the families of two neighborhood kids Avery currently goes to school with.
Sunday I'm quite sure I'll spend packing for my flight later in the day. Since they changed the time of the Timbers game, D will be able to drop Avery and me at the airport. Avery and I are quite excited to see our CO/WY/CA relatives who will be at Dylan's (my nephew) 3rd birthday celebration.
That sounds like a lot of fruit leather.
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