Blueberry Picking

Spent a half a day touring Pitt Meadows, and here are some pictures to share. Hope they'll get you salivating!


Okay nothing to drool about. It took a bit of courage for me to be near bees. One actually landed on my hair and I quickly swiped it off. Lucky for me, that did not agitate it enough to release pheromones and marked me a target. I have never liked being near bees even though I love honey - absolutely no correlation. When I was in primary school - when Fuzziebrain was a small young boy - I witness a classmate getting stung and crying real badly. That was after another classmate threw a stone at the nest. Boys will be boys, ya?


So you'll never catch me trying this silly stunt. Anyway, we paid $2 each to enter the Dr Bee carnival, so I thought I better make picture sense. This needed a little more courage to walk up close to get a better shot of Dr Bee growing his Bee Beard. Took him quite a while to thicken his beard. He had placed a queen bee in a bottle and attached it round his neck like a necklace. His helper then threw the bees on to his chest, and they gradually coaxed the bees to cluster around the trapped queen. Lots of bees buzzing around me, but I'm glad I got this shot.


Dr Bee closeup! Checkout the flapping wings!


Now for the more interesting part of the day. We spent a few hours at a blueberry farm. 5 of us trawling rows of blueberry shrubs and picking every large bluish fruit and putting them in our plastic bags and pails. And while we picked, we ate.


In all, we collected 11 pounds of blueberry and a small bag of strawberries, which the farm owner gave it to us for free. We paid $1.50 per pound. But it was worth it. Not so much about the fruits, but the time spent with my family.

Freshly toasted!

I have made a small but significant change to the Freebase Search Plugin I was working on a while ago. I have moved the suggest script over to Google App Engine and should perform a little faster and will be more reliable in the long term (as long as Google does not start charging me exorbitant fees to run the script). It is my first foray into the world of Python, so please forgive me for any petty bugs that might exist in the code.

The script uses the Freebase Python Client API with some modifications. I added an additional method that utilises the Freebase search API. I'll be happy to share with anyone interested in the changes I have made. Just drop me a comment.

Meanwhile, try out the plugin and let me know what you think. Better still, contribute to the social knowledge base and make this an even more useful tool for everyone.