My fiancee and I are pretty big fans of the show Portlandia. It’s irreverent humor and scattered skits are pretty off-putting at first, considering you struggle to follow along with what in the world is going on. But once you get into it, you start to see some familiar faces and scenes with a slow-moving “plot” (if you can call it that) that sort of describes Portland’s weird culture.
In one of the early episodes, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein (who are portrayed as different characters in just about every scene in the show) have wacky roles as people who “can pickle that!” It starts off as commentary talking about pickling, well, pickles. But from there, it gets pretty ridiculous. They claim they can pickle anything, which goes out of the way to start talking about items that aren’t even vegetables that are traditionally pickled.
Anyway, fast forward 4 or 5 months, and my fiancee and I have finished the entire 9-season series. We never did see the scene pop back up again as a follow up to the first scene, but we did find ourselves pickling our own cucumbers.
We had the appropriate packaging supplies and pickling supplies after buying some vinegar and the right seasonings to pickle cucumbers, and lo and behold we were able to pickle some mighty fine pickles. They taste better than store-bought, in my opinion, because we were able to dilute the jars with more vinegar than usual. When I eat a pickle, I want some kick to the mouth.
It’s funny how sometimes ideas can come to fruition because of the supplies you have available. Take one of our recent projects, for instance. We had enough packaging supplies (thanks to her dad owning a furniture company) to load up a lot of our unused clothes, trinkets, and other junk. We decided cleaning out the apartment some and donating the clothes was a good cause, since there was no way we were going to make hardly any money at all on it.
Most of the time, people have an idea and go out to get what’s needed. But it can be very fun and rewarding to look at the things you already have and make an appropriate judgment call on what can be done with those supplies instead. All it takes is a bit of creativity and some action to start a new project, try something unique, or get things done.
