Lessons in patience, lessons in greed

[soothing voice] and now..."Deep Thoughts"...with Agent B

Lesson #1 - Pecans

I never in my life thought I'd enjoy things like...trees, plants and you know...how to grow stuff. Maybe I'm learning to enjoy the simple things in life that the CEO gave us. Maybe I'm getting old.

The wife and I bought a house here on Undercover Lane 2.5 years ago. And on our property came a pecan tree. "Hey", I thought. "I've never owned a tree before. I'm gonna use it to the fullest extent". I've lived in rent houses with pecan trees in the yard. I never paid attention to them except that they were a nuisance, with all those pecans dropping in the fall, sap and such. But now I'm a pecan connoisseur. When the pecan season all said and done with in the fall of 2003 we must have had at least a five gallon bucket full or more. I looked up various pecan pie recipes and baked for the first time in my existence. I put pecans in everything, waffles, salads, cookies. Hell, someone should invent a pecan beer. And it might as well be me. Someday.


I desperately looked forward to the following fall (2004). But that's when I learned the ugly truth that pecan trees only put out once every TWO years. Crap. There were like a handful of pecans in '04 but the freaking squirrels got them all. I've since trained Agent Dog to chase squirrels and fling 'em like a rag doll if caught.

Our tree is chock full of them this year. But only a few have dropped as it's still too early. Maybe in the next two weeks. But I've learned that if you pull them out of the tree when the husks are not fully open, they will taste too squishy. They're "green", as Obi-Wan says.

So basically, pecans are teaching me patience. Which sucks because I want my pecans. Now.

Lesson #2 - Okra

The same year we moved in, Agent Wife wanted to plant a garden where a large storage shed use to be which was removed by the previous owners. I wasn't too interested but I helped anyway. All that season I maintained and watered the garden and I became obsessed with it. I love gardening now.

We're far from gardening experts. But this is our third year and we get better every year. For example...this is the first year that I didn't accidentally kill off the entire garden by July 4. It's almost November and we're still getting real good okra. I killed off everything else though. Accidentally.

Picking okra is weird. You would think that if you wanted more bang for your buck (read: bigger okra) you would leave it on the plant longer. Wrong. The longer you leave okra on the plant the more useless it becomes. It gets hard and impossible to cut through. So you can't let it grow too big. You cannot get greedy and your timing has to be perfect.

I have no freaking idea what any of this has to do with secret agent operations, but I've been thinking on this a while. Seems like the CEO is showing me something.