You can brag about...

Your lakeshore condos and that bran' spankin' Porsche Turbo... but out here at the Halls, we're brewin' up the world's most expensive breakfast garnish.

At Mrs. Neo's behest, we finally, after six years on the property... went out and bought the gear to gather and produce our own maple syrup.

It's a pretty modest enterprise, consisting of a mere 6 buckets on 3 trees... but it's ours and we're proud of it. The buckets, spiles, lids and filters, to our initial horror, set us back 80 smackers... but we'll be amortising that over the next couple of decades so I guess it's actually no big deal.

It's coming up 24 hours and we have been simmering the first haul, off and on, all day. Apparently you need to boil down 40 gallons of sap to get one gallon of syrup.

It'll be interesting to see how it all turns out.

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UPDATE: Day 1

Ok... no syrup today.

I had to go out and Mrs. Neo was holding down the fort. Apparently there is a very fine line between concocting maple syrup and maple sugar. Mrs. N says that's the trouble with real life versus "book larnin'".

On the plus side, maple sugar is pretty tasty too.

We'll try again tomorrow.

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