This has turned out to be Raspberry Week.

I have semi-wild raspberries growing in my back yard. My neighbor across the street, who’s lived here about 30 years, says someone down the block planted raspberries years ago, and they spread around the area, thanks to birds. While my house was abandoned, they grew out of control in the yard. The person who bought the house at tax auction and restored it just mowed the back yard down before putting it on the market, and then the berry bushes sprang up last summer. I guess that makes them feral berries.

Apparently, they only produce berries the second year, so only a few bushes along the fence had survived the mowing. I got about 20 berries, total. This year, I have a huge thicket full of berries. They’re black raspberries, so they taste kind of like a sweeter blackberry with fewer seeds. Yesterday, I filled a container that 18 ounces of blueberries came in and most of a pint container. I baked a pie last night, and I still have most of that 18-ounce container, plus nearly a pint from this morning. There are more berries that I couldn’t get to because I wasn’t wearing the right clothes to get in there among all the thorns. I’ll have to put on jeans later today and give it another try. I’m thinking of making jam, though I did have some with my yogurt for breakfast.

After this growing season, I need to cut the bushes back (I found some instructions on how to deal with raspberries), and I plan to train them up on trellises to keep them under better control so I can get to the berries easier. I’ll also be evicting some of the bushes that are growing where I don’t want them, like in the campfire pit. They pop up all over the place, and it’s a constant battle to keep them from taking over the whole yard. On the other hand, these are very good berries. I think that pie was the most “from scratch” thing I’ve ever baked, since it used berries I picked and that I grew. Not that I had anything to do with the growing. I did nothing to tend them. I feel like I earned them just by picking them because my hands and wrists are all scratched up. I wear long sleeves to deal with them, but the berries are so delicate that I don’t think I could pick them while wearing gloves.

Now, an update to the blinds/curtains saga.

The blinds I got last week didn’t work. For one thing, they were not as “blackout” as advertised. I think they blocked less light than the lightly-lined curtains I was using. For another, they didn’t sit flush against the window frame. The bracket put them out about half an inch, so light came out from the sides and top. And then they just didn’t work. I couldn’t pull them down and they didn’t roll up. When I tried, the mechanism that was supposed to roll them up and down came out and then they just unfurled completely.

I did a little more research, and I found that the brackets of all the blinds like that stick out. You’ll only get close to complete blackout by putting them inside the window frame. I got the bright idea to mark the measurements on a strip of vinyl from trimming that blind so I could really get into the frame and see what size might work in the frame, and it looked like the next larger size of the blinds I got last year would have fit, though it would be very close. Close is good, though, since it gets closer to blackout. I hadn’t been able to measure that precisely using a yardstick or metal measuring tape because they don’t fit inside the frame.

And then I got an e-mail from Lowe’s with a coupon for 10% off an entire purchase, which made it seem like it was meant to be, so I got those blinds. Once I took the old blinds out, I found out that my original measurements had been accurate. The window frame is smaller at the top. But if I took the plastic end caps off the top and bottom of the blinds, they fit perfectly. And since they’re the same kind of blinds I already had, I just used the brackets that were already there.

It is a bit annoying that I spent so much time and money trying to work this out, and I could have just bought the next larger size to begin with, but I didn’t know then that there were plastic caps on the ends that could come out to make up that tiny bit of width.

It’s still not total blackout, as there’s a tiny sliver of light around the edges, but it’s better than it was, and this morning I actually managed to sleep almost to 7 a.m., when I’ve been waking up around 5:30, whether or not I was well-rested. I’ve also been able to open the blinds during the day and open the windows when the evenings have been cool since I don’t have to undo my elaborate light-blocking rigs. I’d tried balancing skinny boxes to fit around the edges, plus throwing the curtains over the rods holding the lace curtains. With these blinds, I don’t have to do anything. Maybe if I wanted to sleep in the middle of the afternoon or if I wanted to sleep late in the middle of summer I could go back to throwing the curtains over the rod, but for most of the time, the blinds alone are just fine.

Now I can turn to fixating on the windows in the rest of the house, but I’m going to take a break from all that until maybe next month. I have to deal with the raspberry explosion first. Then it looks like I’ll have a lot of ripe tomatoes soon, and I’ll have to deal with that. It would be nice if they’d ripen a few at a time so I can just have them in salads and don’t have to deal with them all at once. They do seem to be in various phases of development.