Worm Hole Aliens

Fall in the air so on a recent weekend it was time to get the "Up North" place ready for winter.  The dock is now in, the firewood stacked neatly, a bit of needed painting attended to.

There was a little time left over for leisure pursuits.  So we harvested hazel nuts.

Usually it takes a bit to get me interested in this sort of Granola/Paleodiet/locovore type nonsense but it was a gloriously sunny day, and besides, I remembered finding hazel nuts in perfect preservation down in the 18 century old anaerobically preserved layers back in my archeology days.

Here's what they look like au naturale.

When you pull off those brownish clumps you get little clusters that look like this:

We ended up with three good sized grocery bags full of these.  The next task is to shuck out the smooth brown nuts and discard the husks.  It was a time consuming process.  Guess I know now what the pioneers did before any sort of modern entertainment technology.

As you sit there automatically husking these things a sort of trance state sets in.  And darn it all I  found myself staring at the pods and thinking....hey, these look familiar. Lemme just take a closer look....

Happily nothing jumped out and grabbed my face, but hazel nuts do have a sort of peculiar Sci Fi connection.  Because not infrequently you encounter:

Yep, a Worm Hole.

End result of three bags of pods was about 5 quarts of hazel nuts.  Once we crack 'em open and get the actual edible part out I figure we can boil it all down and make one jar of Nutella, stuff I don't actually much care for anyway....