Beating the Heat...

To me, these berries taste like nostalgia <3

Yikes. The summer heat was beastly this weekend.

John and I live in an apartment that has doesn't have many windows; our only source of natural sunlight comes from a big, sliding door that leads out to our balcony. We have a window in the bedroom too, but we don't rely on it to light up our apartment during the day. Luckily, our apartment faces west, so our apartment just SOAKS up natural sunlight; getting nice and bright and staying nice and bright until the sun goes down.

The bright-sunshiny sunlight comes at a cost, though. The fact that we face west AND are on the top floor can make our apartment almost UNBEARABLY hot on some days.

Carl Sagan the Angry Fish seems to enjoy it when it warms up like this; which isn't surprising given that he's a tropical fish. He's been happily swimming around his tank and building bubble nests next to his floating algae ball, undoubtedly plotting his Machiavellian revenge against me for taking him out of the tank and putting him in a cup when I last gave his tank a good cleaning.

The same cannot be said for Miss Mishka, poor girl. She's been acting lethargic and has been grooming herself constantly, so I can tell that the heat is starting to bother her. We asked the vet if it would be a good idea to give her a Lion cut, but they said that it really wouldn't benefit a short-haired cat. So we made her some frozen "kitty ice cream" (yogurt and tuna fish frozen in an ice cube tray) to cool her down.

On Sunday morning, we decided that we simply had to cool ourselves down as well. So we got in our air-conditioned car and drove to Snohomish county to go berry picking.

The farm we went to, Biringer farm, had a large sign out front indicating what was ripe and ready to pick: Strawberries, Raspberries, Tayberries, and Black Caps.

When I saw that Black Caps were available, I was delighted! I hadn't seen these berries available in years!

I used to pick these lovely little jewels of delicious with my grandmother when I was younger. They grow wild near my grandparents' dairy farm in central Wisconsin, so we would pick these by the bucket-full every summer. Grandma would use these berries the same as one would use regular raspberries, putting them in pies and jams.

We picked about a flat each of black caps, raspberries, and bought a flat of strawberries.

And we made our own frozen treat using the Black Caps:

And then we got an air conditioner <3

Stay cool, Readers!