So, this again.

I've set up shop in D.C. for the summer. So expect more posts coming in from the Daily Caller, and the things I've neglected to post from the Collegian. I swear.

Maple Tea in Canada

I’ve been spending the past few days in Canada with Maddie and her family. It’s nice, quiet, and relaxing. They make their own maple syrup. It’s good.

We, Maddie, her three brothers, and myself, went out to the backwoods to gather sap from the maple trees. It’s a bit odd to walk around and see a dozen small tin buckets latched to trees with little roofs on top of their rims, but you instantly know what they are and what they’re for.

I didn’t know that syrup, and by syrup I mean sap, looks like water before being refined to that sugary substance we put on our pancakes. I also didn’t know that maple syrup, at least homemade maple syrup, is a tasty addition to tea. I’ve grown fond of this mix lately -- it’s sweeter than sugar and adds a distinct flavor without overpowering the tea. It's nice.

Homemade maple syrup is typically made in a shed. The Pascoe’s isn’t. It’s made in their garage with two large pots holding 60 liters, nearly 32 gallons combined. Normally, according to Mr. Pascoe, there’d be a long pan stove heated by wood in a long shed. He said the pan stove allows water in the sap to evaporate quicker. 

The Pascoe’s wait until enough water evaporates from their pots before they empty one into the other. They skim the foam off the top of the sap, wait, skim again, wait, skim again, pour one pot into the other and fill the empty pot with more sap. Out of 120 liters of maple sap they may get three and a half liters; 19 hours of work for just under a gallon. But the syrup is good and worth the work. Especially when it's in tea.

The Kickers

It's a late night at the Collegian, so I decided to occupy myself by recalling this scene weeks ago. Leave comments and criticisms, if you please.

The sidewalks are too icy, so I walk in the middle of the street to get back home. The storm did a number on the town, knocking out power for a week. It created a nomadic group of off-campus students seeking warmth wherever they could find it – old dorms, old homes, couches in the Union, wherever. I've managed to survive in the Suites for the past four days. But I need to change my clothes, forcing my body to endure a house which makes the outdoors feel warm and inviting. I do not look forward to the cold.

So I trudge home, glaring at the ground and grit at my bad luck. BAM-BAM! BAM-BAM, BAM! BAM!

The noise came from two kids kicking the side of a steel shed to my right. BAM-BAM! The small one, no older than 7, took an extra swipe. He missed and nearly fell backwards. He carefully balanced on his grounded leg, like a bad figure skater. The older one, the wiser one, laid out the attack strategy: kick the shed at any cost. BAM!

The small one regained his composure and jumped back into the fray. BAM-BAM!

The shed, with a hat of snow and concrete foundation, stood stoic, indifferent to the war waging on its side.

What the hell? 

I kept walking to my house, but as I went the two developed a new method of warfare. A flank. The older one instructed the small one to head to the shed's western side, while he attacks the eastern wall. 

The small one eagerly ran around. BAM! POW!

BAM! POW!...Bam-Bam!...Pow!

As so goes Hillsdale when there's no power.

I reach my house and unlock the door. I can still hear them in the distance...bam!..pow!...bam!

“People here need to get out more,” I think. I go inside, and brace my body for the cold.

Things worth reading: An Unpublished Interview With Hunter S. Thompson

http://thequietus.com/articles/05707-hunter-s-thompson-interview

Oh, and for your listening pleasure:

I love Instapaper.

For the longest time I've used NetNewsWire as my primary RSS reader. It pulls RSS feeds off of the websites I like and puts them into a nice little faux web browser in the reader. That way I can get the 'full-effect' of reading the feeds in their natural habitat in a small browser rather than firing up an actual browser and reading them there. And for a long time I was happy, filling a sidebar full of unread articles that, someday, I would read. But after a brief incident where NetNewsWire decided that Gizmodo.com was Fleshbot.com (yes, that'd be a pornographic website) in Hillsdale's Mossey Library, thus introducing Hillsdale's more impressionable fundies to hardcore bondage, I decided it might be time to switch to a new RSS reader.

So, I started using Google Reader and haven't bothered to look back. I've only had one gripe with Google Reader and it's how much my eyes hurt after squinting at the screen for a half hour reading its feeds. Enter Instapaper.

Instapaper is a free website which cuts out all of the crummy ads out of news articles and blog posts and leaves nothing but the text -- which, by the way, is wonderful when you're reading a 49 page long article on Scientology. Really, though, it's nice to have a web page dedicated to simple text, and occasionally a picture or two without having ads trying to persuade you that Hillsdale, Mich., is the perfect place to meet 20 somethings who want to do nasty things with you in bed, that you've won an X-box 360, iPad, iPhone and a new computer all at once, that you can get a magazine subscription for pennies on the dollar and that a helpful informational ad wants you to know that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, but a socialist hell bent on spreading a pinko-commie doctrine.

All gone. And it saves my eyesight. Which is kind of the point, I suppose.