This is Legwork and Life, where I track the legwork and opportunities in my career as an autistic advocate, and also describe parts of my adult autistic life, including my perspectives on everyday problems and situations.
I've been sick for the last week and a half with a summer cold. It's sapped my energy and also made it hard to sleep, which is a really shoddy combination if you're trying to get better quickly. Apparently "quickly" is just not happening, though, because every time I think I'm getting better, I wake up just as sick or worse the next day. It's just kind of been a bad month, since getting wound up from SGDQ, I just haven't recovered. Neither has my buffer, which isn't helping my anxiety levels at all.
This is Toro. I'm taking care of her for about a week and a half. She is quite a handful. She's a Pionus parrot, and she belongs to some friends who have to be out of the house for that long. Parrots are social critters, and it's bad for them to be alone. She's fully flighted, and is happiest being out of her cage for the whole day at a time. So we've semi-parrot-proofed the downstairs for her.
Taking care of her is an endeavor, and reminds me that I still have a lot of my own life stuff to sort out before my spouse and I adopt anything ourselves.
In the meantime, other things occurred:
One of those same friends is into wild food, so we went berrying for black raspberries recently. They're ripe now. I actually had that container on the left entirely full, but they're tasty. So I've been eating them, feeding them to friends, and trying to feed them to Toro. She's not impressed so far.
I am, though. They're mainly sweet, but there's some tang and tart mixed in. When I was little, I'd found these and pointed them out to my mother, who told me they were safe. After a certain age, I didn't put things in my mouth that I wasn't sure about, so it was cool to be able to just wander into the woods and find these in my first neighborhood in Minnesota. I had no idea they were called black raspberries, just that they were tasty and you had to fight with thorns to get at them. I never collected a ton, and of course they don't last forever.
This time, my friend and I went prepared. I'd read in a book to have your container fastened around your waist, so you can use both hands for picking, so I rigged up some string, tape, and the rectangular container there. The thorns definitely had their say, and I had to pry a few off me in the course of gathering. I was also still sick at the time, so I had to take rests quite regularly, which was disappointing as it wasn't exactly hard work. Lots of bending over, but not really jumping jacks or even running.
Still, can't argue with the payoff. I had a small bowl of berries in addition to this cereal for breakfast. Tomorrow my spouse will make summer salad, which is kind of what you get if you mix fruit salad with green leafy salad with herb baked chicken and top the whole thing with flax seeds and slivered almonds. It was an odd concept for me at first, but I can't argue with the delicious results. Normally he'd just use raspberries or blackberries from the store, but since we have these, why not use them? They're maybe a quarter to a third the size of store raspberries, but they're packed with flavor and nutrition.
Probably a lot moreso than their domestic cousins, actually. Modern crops tend to be grown in nutrient-poor soil. They plant the same crops there year after year, and only plant one type of plant, which all uses the same nutrition out of the same soil. After a few years, the soil's nutrition is gone, but in modern farming, you don't let that stop you from planting again the next year... or the year after, or the year after. So you get crops with poor nutritional content.
Wild stuff, on the other hand, grows alongside tons of other types of plants, which have varying nutrient requirements but also put back some kinds of nutrition into the soil. So you get good, healthy, nutrient-filled soil, which grows these black raspberries into little nutritional powerhouses.
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