For the record, I don't have my nose in my laptop ALL day long. I also set aside some time for couch tatery. And I do enjoy communing with nature, which sounds daft and New Agey, I realize. Still, "spending time outdoors" feels like off verbage, because that could be construed as me being "outdoorsy" an adjective that I think connotes kayaking and mountain climbing, and while I suspect both activities are worthwhile, I don't partake in either. Not my bag. Too exercisey.

For some reason that has yet to dawn on me, I always find myself picking berries. Whatever's in season really, like I know what hills the wild strawberries grow on, (these have gone by, they peaked back in June, then the black raspberries came & went in July) and go check how the "crops" are (this is just wild growing stuff, I am not engaging in any manner of legal or illegal agriculture)and pick as many as I can. Right now it's blackberries. I got thoroughly perforated the other day picking blackberries (got some nice ones though) I was pondering, while delicately trying to creep through the sharp pricky branches, why blackberry bushes even have prickers. I mean, I don't know a lot about agriculture or botany or whatever, and by "not a lot" I mean NADA. But it seems like there is functionality present in the design of most all plant life. So WHY the ouchy thorns? Why stave off potential pickers/ gnoshers? I think it is beneficial for the plant for its ripe berries to be picked rather that just having them wither and dry up on the bush. So what the wha, blackberry bushes? You just don't wanna give up the berries easy...you're not slutty like them strawberry plants, eh?

I don't know why, but I always think of picking blackberries as a very French Canadian thing to do. This isn't linked to any preexisting ethnic stereotypes (that I know of) but it's simply because my Pepere's (my paternal grandfather...my Dad's side of the fam is 1000% Québécois) ad-libbed stories pretty much always started out with 2 anonymous little girls (stand ins for my sister and I) picking blackberries. Pretty much always they encountered a bear. I think the only variant was in their means of elusion/defense/escape. Also, when I get a whole lot of blackberries, my Dad will eat them on bread with sugar on them (a treat his father used to eat) and he calls that a miteau. I don't know that it's spelled like that, because I've never had my dad or Pepere spell it. I tried checking online for miteau, meteau, mito, even "blackberry bread sugar" , "blackberries, sugar, bread, Canada" and "blackberries on bread with sugar Canada" and...yeah, nothin'. I've binged the hell outta this sumbitch and basically the internets are telling me that this is a snackie my grandfather made up and slapped a French sounding made-up name on. Oh, I did learn that Miteau is a fairly common French surname, so maybe he named it after somebody.
Could it be that no one in Quebec uses the internet? Or is Bing anti-Quebecois and I should take my quest to Google? Damn, I would hate to have to boycott Bing. I've made it my search engine of choice, and I really dig their picture-of-the-day thingie they do!!