July 19, 2004

Life's a bowl of cherries

No kidding. I am being haunted by these cherries. They are in my house, near my house, on the sidewalk in front of my house, being tracked into the house, being pilfered and thrown by neighbourhood children and stolen by little old men and women with bowls under cover of darkness. (Not that I mind...they can have as many of the little red orbs from hell as they want, but if you want to steal cherries, and you come at night so that I won't know you are there, try not to have a loud argument in Ukrainian two feet from my window, it blows your cover )

The cherry situation resolved a little when I discovered that I can pit cherries with a 2mm needle. I believe that this act tricked the most basic, instinctive parts of my brain into thinking that I was doing something to do with knitting, thereby making the pitting process at least only mind-numbingly stupid, not torturous.

pitting

Cherries pitted, there only remained the problem of what to do with several pounds of pitted cherries. Answer?

cherrycake

Mmmm....the first aran sleeve and Cherry Upside-Down Cake. This yarn and the cake are both heartily recommended, enough so, that the burning pain of pitting a thousand cherries sort of started to seem like maybe it was worth it. Sure, that twitch over my eye is back again, but now I've got nice knitting and good cake. This combination restores my spirit and I wander back into the kitchen and attack the remaining pounds of cherries. (I am troubled briefly by the fact that there doesn't seem to be less cherries, I mean I was just in here, I took a whole whack of them out of the bowl...shouldn't there be fewer cherries?) I make...

cherrybars

The second Aran sleeve and Cherry Bars. These are good, but not as good as the cake. Actually, that's not fair. It could be, that if I had tried the cherry bars before gorging on several pieces of Upside down cake, and pitting all those cherries and sweeping the suicidal ones off of the sidewalk, and generally wishing for sweet release from the cherry nightmare that has conumed my life, that I might have had a more positive attitude toward the Cherry bars and cherries in general. I admit that at this point I have inexplicably begun to call this little sweater the "Cherry Aran", even though it is not cherry coloured, or has cherry motifs or even bobbles or something you could interpret as cherry-inspired. No, no, it is guilty by association. When the cherry bars were baked (and not eaten) I went back into the kitchen to try to deal with the remaining pitted and waiting cherries. I will confess at this point that I suspect Joe of picking and pitting cherries secretly to replace the ones that I used up in these marathon baking sessions. The other alternative is that the bowl of cherries is bottomless, which is too horrible to even contemplate.
I decide to switch tactics.

osweater3

What cherries?
Damn straight. I've begun the back of the Cherry aran, and heartlessly thrust the remaining pitted cherries into ziplocks (in amount appropriate for upside-down cake) and shoved them into the freezer. I'm sure that when the memory of cherry overload fades I'll feel like eating them again. Seriously, I picked several pounds and gave them away, then I picked several pounds and baked and froze them, plus I was ripped of my neighbours, not to mention the tons that have been eaten by local wildlife, including the kid down the street who has been using them for "ammo" for several days. You would think that the end would be in sight.

stillpicken

Not even close. Here's Sam as of 10am this morning. I'm going to look away, I'm going to avert my eyes. I'm going to sit down with the little Cherry Aran and not speak of this for some time. What's wrong with a little good old fashioned repression? What?

Posted by Stephanie at July 19, 2004 11:56 AM