A Rosy Day

I have a lot to 'get to' this morning-- oops, it is afternoon-- but I seem to be fastened to this chair.  I am going to make my famous (yeah, right) Fresh Mango Salsa to take to my ToastMasters' Beach Party tonight (so called because the fellow who volunteered to host the party lives right on the beach).

I spent a good hunk of the morning trying to get a decrepid Epson Perfection 1250 scanner to work... it has done it before, but I guess, now, I must face the music.... my son told me that it was "toast" and I guess it is.

Another few hours in the morning were spent in watering the yard, front and back.  It's a glorious warm sunny late June day... even though the doomsayers were projecting that it was going to be nasty and miserable from now until the weekend... well, if they are wrong about today, they could well be wrong about the weekend, and that is great, since our Surrey family is coming, as well as Ed's neice and her husband.... to celebrate Canada Day (my daughter-in-law's first Canada Day). I was hoping that the blueberries would be ready to eat, but that won't happen... we'll have to see if we can go and pick some strawberries at the nearby U Pick place, Ash Berry Farm although they had an ad in the paper and might be all picked out....hehehe.

I was sniffing at the beautiful roses out front (I'm not bragging-- someone else planted and tended them for years, and I'm just in awe).  The ones with the most pronounced scent look like a tarted-up version of the wild roses that grow all across Western Canada, while the really dazzling art display roses have very little scent.

The rose  below is large and showy-- the heads are absolutely huge, almost the size of a head of iceberg lettuce, no kidding... maybe they would be good to eat -- didn't consider that today (have been told that quite a lot lately).  This one was so heavy that it had fallen over, bringing the branch with it.  But did it have a lovely rose scent?  No.  If you were to choose roses to give to someone, would they be like this one, or scented?  Probably like this one-- an indication of how 'visual' our culture has become.

Now, this more pedestrian looking clump of roses-- the ones I describe as looking more like their Wild Rose cousins-- had a most alluring rose scent.  If this rose were grown on acres and acres of land and then the petals were picked on a warm sunny day and put into a distiller, it would only take about a ton of them to make one pound of rose essential oil.

I'm off to make my Mango Salsa now!  Ciao!