Weekend, baby!

And what have we planned for the big exciting weekend?

uh.... we'll be digging up some free blackberry and catnip plants from a "neighbor" (using the term loosely - aka 'someone in the same town') who has too many - this person is also a member of the relocalization group. We'll be doing this in the cold rain. Oh boy oh boy. and then we get to plant them here in the yard. In the rain.

I'd LIKE to go to a sugaring shack for some maple syrup. There's really no reason to do this - I can get perfectly good, locally produced maple syrup here (at the farm up the street), but for some reason I'd rather go and buy a giant vat of it directly from the producer. Their business keeps getting harder and harder. With global warming, the sugar maple trees will be inching northward (or the habitat will be - the trees wont actually we running away - but if they could, I bet they would). And with the spike in fuel costs, it's costing them much more to transport the sap from the trees to the sugaring shack and it's also costing them more to boil down the sap to syrup. If I think my woes with home heating are bad - these people are getting hit all over the place. And since I'd rather their farms keep on being nicely wooded maple syrup farms rather than McMansions, I'll go buy some syrup. But it's got to be Grade B syrup. It tastes better & I can use it in cooking.

We were going to combine the maple syrup trip with a hike up Mt. Monadnock, but honestly, I've gotten over the 'climb it because its there regardless of the weather' stage. We climbed Mt. Washington in some nasty weather a year and a half ago, and I've climber Monadnock in the snow. I want a nice, sunny day next time.

Which brings up the 3rd thing I need to do this weekend: buy new hiking boots. I've been putting it off for 2 years now. they leak. I've worn those boots for years, I've worn them to work on caves in Texas and cactus surveying in the Mojave. I've worn them to the sites I've worked on in New England. They been to Yosemite, to Olympic Nat'l park several times. Death Valley, Volcano NP, northern Mississippi, the California coast, Oregon... Everywhere I've visited or worked in the past 7 years or so. They are beat to hell and one day their leakiness will become some sort of an emergency. So new boots it is. I've been looking for months, and it's getting desperate. I need to break them in now so I can start training for a multi-day hike in mid-August (more on that later).