So I don't post for days on end...

...and then I inundate you with a bunch of photos. ;)

In case you didn't already see it at Facebook or Twitter (where I share far too many things about myself, right, Amber?), here's what we've up to the past few days.

I finally mailed off the hand-made paper that dh's wonderful cousin and his wife pre-paid for. Unfortunately, we've not perfected envelopes yet, so I had to include store-bought ones. The dark thing on the paper is not a bug; it's a blossom on the paper that we embedded flowers in. We froze a whole bunch of beans (I wish I could remember how many bag-fulls); here they are being blanched:Some time last week, I tried a new recipe. I actually wanted to make the one Sherrie posted on her blog, but didn't have almonds, so I made the King Arthur Flour's Blueberry Buckle instead.It was just O.K.Some of you might remember that last Saturday, we got about 19 quarts of tomatoes canned. Well, by Thursday (Aug. 27th), we had to can again. Here's the pile of tomatoes right before we processed them. And you know what? On Saturday (Aug. 29th), we processed tomatoes again! This time, we did 10 pints of salsa, and 7 quarts + 6 pints of tomatoes. I'll give you three guesses as to what we'll be doing in another couple of days. ;)
Because Megan asked, I thought I'd post some photos of projects I've finally finished. Ok, this one is sort of finished. I knitted a very plain scarf (but up close, you'd be able to see the lovely multi-colored strand of thread woven through this mohair yarn...from this distance, it just looks like a scarf that a 4 year old threw together after 5 knitting classes), but what I plan on doing is weaving some lovely little beads through it to give it an extra sparkle. It's for dh's cousin who has given me and the boys many great gifts throughout the years.
I finally finished the hat for dh...and guess what? He said it feels too big and he doesn't like it. Maybe I'll list it on Etsy.
Not made by me, but by the lovely Heather...she added these goodies in when I bought some liquid soaps from her (my favorite: Peppermint Party).
Here's the salsa I was telling you about:
Oh, we canned our first green beans (we normally freeze them) using our new pressure canner...here they are, ready to go into the canner:
And here's the canner...think I'll call her Big Bertha. If I dropped her on my foot, I can forget about walking on it the rest of my life:I also made tsukemono using my friend Grace's recipe (or Grace's mom's recipe, if you're gonna be picky). They are soooo delicious!
Dh made a pork stir fry that evening using our own onions, our own squash, our own peppers, and our own green beans. The pork was from a local farmer. The only thing that was not local or grown by us were the shitake mushrooms...which prompted a conversation about trying to grow our own again next year.
And now for something totally different: in case all that food has made you hungry, I'll help you not go gorge yourself by showing you a parasitized caterpillar. If you click on the photo, you'll see the eggs laid on it. I think they're wasp eggs...but I need to check with ds#1 or dh.
Hope you had a more exciting weekend than we did doing all that canning. ;) Did you see anything quite as gross as the caterpillar? Do share!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Just a quick question

As my Facebook and Twitter friends know, I've had a long day: canning, toilet cleaning, doing laundry, jogging, and baking. So, I won't write much tonight.

However, I have to get this one question off my mind and out to my readers. :)

I sometimes feel like when I reply to comments, it looks like I'm just trying to up my comments count. I'm not. But, I hate for people to feel unacknowledged.

I have noticed many ways of replying in the...*ahem*...close to 100 blogs I visit. Some almost never reply to comments. Some (e.g. Terri, and Wendy) will reply via e-mail. Some (e.g. Blonde Duck) will come to your blog to reply on your latest post. I like both those methods, and there may be another way I've not even thought of.

My question for you, dear readers, is: what do you prefer? No response at all from me unless you ask a question? If you ask a question, do you prefer I email or come to your blog to reply as a comment on your latest post? Or ??

I guess I'll post a poll for ease, but if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please share them in the comments!

Thank you, everyone! Hope you're enjoying the weekend!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Has someone touched your life?

A very wonderful man made a huge difference in my life when I was attending university. He was the administrative assistant in the Psychology Department when I was an undergrad. I used to arrive to school (and work because I was on a work-study program) early, and he and I used to sit and chat about life. Because of his kindness and faith in my ability to work hard, I got a prize summer job that allowed me to save up enough money to go to Europe when I graduated. I'd lost touch with him since, but have thought of him often in the past 23 years.

A mutual friend of ours - another wonderful man who was a psychology prof and my employer for a couple of years - just emailed me today to tell me that Mr. Gove was celebrating his 88th birthday.

I'm so happy that Mr. Gove is alive and well and have made up my mind to ask Rod for his address so that I can finally write him a letter to let him know how much I appreciated all he's done for me.

On a completely separate note, but somewhat related to my previous post, here's an interesting article on factory farms and their impact on our foods.

Has someone made a huge difference in your life that you've lost touch with? Would you write to him/her if you had the chance?

Hope everyone is enjoying the week!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

The week in recap

Because I've been too darned lazy and busy to do a post during the week, I'm down to Sunday and don't want to bore you with a long post.

An update on the copperheads: it would appear that after guarding our blueberry bushes from the marauding chipmunks, and obviously having eaten all the chipmunks in our backyard, they have decided to move on to a new home. We've not seen them all week. I'm a relieved but a little sad. They did do a darn good job with keeping the chipmunk population down.

Dh picked some more Asian pears this week. This is what happens when you leave them alone for a while instead of trying to pick them early: they grow bigger! Duh. The one on the left was picked a couple of weeks ago, while the one on the right had a chance to catch a few more rays of sun on the tree.Yesterday was canning day. The pile o' tomatoes in front of dh was just 1/3 of what we ended up processing. We got a total of 18 3/4 quarts of sauce! The 3/4 quart we didn't can, but will use for borani or something this coming week. Never leave more than a small head-space in your canning jar.All the tomatoes in 4 big pots:Did I mention that they were in FOUR big pots?We watched a bit of Mad City Chickens last night. We'd first seen it written up in a paper in Vancouver, and requested that our library get a copy of it. Being the generally agreeable library it is, our wish was granted. It's a cute little film, a bit silly and humorous. What struck me as sad though, was, at the beginning of the film, someone in Madison, WI, who had been raising chickens illegally, said that one of her neighbors complained to the city about her chickens...not because of the noise or the smell, but because this neighbor was afraid this woman might eat the chickens. I'm boggled as to where this neighbor thinks the supermarket chickens come from? Rained down from the sky in a pristine shrink-wrapped form?? It's disturbing how some people are so removed from their food (and ancestral roots of merely a couple of generations ago) that they think it's unnatural to raise and process one's own meat.

We finished up the kids' swim lessons this week. It was good to find out that they didn't forget everything that they learned last year. :)

Our homeschool co-ops and classes will start up next week and the week after. I guess fall is officially here, despite it not being September yet.

Has school/homeschool started for your kids yet? What sorts of fun things are you doing as August comes to an end?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Because my brain is in the shop...

...I'm going to subject you to some random firings of the handful of neurons they left behind to hold me through the week. :}

We had a couple of weird and unexpected hail storms a couple of weeks ago. The one that woke us up in the middle of the night produced marble-sized hail. (Incidentally, the leaves are large sycamore leaves, not maple leaves, so the hail is bigger than you think) -While Annie (Imagine & Create) is watching out for polar bears - doesn't that sound exotic? - we're watching out for the copperheads that have decided to take up residence under our blueberry bushes right next to the house:I just saw some pretty tomatoes over at Cake's blog (Rake Shovel Hoe), which reminded me that I'd taken photos of our own red beauties:
And while we're on the subject of veggies, I had the kids harvest about 10 pounds of corn yesterday. After I shucked them, I decided that they were too pretty to go without a photo:A few weeks ago, dh decided to try making a ratatouille because we were over-run with eggplants. Before baking:
After bakng: It looked better than it tasted, so he went back to making borani with the eggplants we harvested later.

This year has been a bumper-crop year for chanterelle mushrooms. This is just one of the many grocery bagfuls dh and the boys harvested:After cleaning the bag of 'shrooms up, and laying them out to dry:Dh cooked them various ways: sauteed in butter, sauteed with green beans, and, my favorite way, cream of mushroom soup!

It's been too hot to do much baking lately, but we had a piece of carrot cake for dessert when we had lunch with my FIL over at his assisted living home, and that got us hankering for more, so I made one. It was very tasty!Do you have any odd, random thoughts for me? Any grand plans for the rest of the weekend? I hope to read the wonderful stories that Blonde Duck (A Duck in Her Pond) sent my way as part of the gift swap back in July!

Happy Sunday to you!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Our garden, a little tour

I promised I'd show you some pictures of and around our garden, so here goes...

This is one of our several semi-dwarf apple trees. They're about 6 years old, and not producing like the dickens yet. The fruits tend to be small and ugly (we don't use chemicals), but the flavor is so complex, it's like the best Pink Lady you've never eaten. ;)I didn't get a photo of the Asian pear tree, but these are just a few of the fruits we harvested:I bought a couple of geraniums from someone selling them for 4-H earlier in the year, and, for some reason, they just never did very well. One of them is finally putting out a bit more bloom:...but the other has one foot in the grave, apparently:And speaking of grave, one of our summer squash plants bit the dust - a sad combination of the fruits not being harvested enough while we were away and borer worm damage.Sometimes, though, what looks like death just means it's ready to harvest. Take these sweet onions, for example:The yellow onions are not quite harvest-ready yet:We finally bought some grapes to plant this year! Here's a close-up of one of the 3 plants:From farther out, you can see they're kind of tiny and pathetic. Deer got to them one evening (before dh put up the fencing) and munched one heavily.The opposite of tiny and pathetic would be our tomatoes. Dh thinks it's because of the grass clippings mulch he's been putting on them, but these babies are 8 feet tall!We're growing several varieties, as usual, but these grape ones are especially cute and tasty:The corn is doing splendidly too:We had our first meal of it Friday evening. Look at those lovely ears: Wandering around, here are some of the (messy) leaks:and some mildly spicy yellow peppers that dh thinks might be Hungarian yellow:One of our green bean beds:The celery always does pretty well for us. Because we don't "blanch" them, they retain a very strong flavor that you'd never find in ones from the store.Inside the greenhouse, we have the Japanese eggplants which have never failed us yet. They're not bitter like the fat eggplants that are more common and the skin isn't tough either.And here's another killer tomato plant inside the greenhouse (notice how it presses on the ceiling?).Most people grow flowers to attract bees and other pollinators. We just grow flowering veggies, which are useful/tasty as well as pretty. Here's a bee on a gai lan (an Asian green) flower:Not from our garden, but this is the wackiest case of a dead frog. Yup, you read right: it's dead, but looks amazingly alive. Dh found it in the pool. Fascinatingly creepy.Do you have anything wacky or fascinatingly creepy to share? Hope you're all enjoying the weekend!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

Things that make me happy...

...and some things that don't. :)

Things that make me happy:

1) Bead Style magazine...I'd long since stopped reading to the blog where I first saw this magazine mentioned (it wasn't making me happy), but this magazine brings a big smile to my face every month.

2) Altruism - see Heidi's new project to find out more, as well as http://breastcancer.about.com/od/treatmentoptions/tp/comfort_pillows.htm to help out those in need.

3) Good deals - Linda's bulk discounts at Spotted Cow Soaps!

Things that don't quite make me happy:

1) Hail storms at 5am.

2) 5 hour power outages (although I am incredibly grateful it wasn't for longer than that).

What made you happy or unhappy today? I promise pictures of our garden on my next post!

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams

We were not alone...

...traveling with us to Vancouver were a bunch of my bloggy buddies! Ok, well, not in person, but their products went with us.

There was Carrie's Spiced Apple soap, Trisha's Winter Wonderland soap and lipbalm (as well as her Crantini soap that she kindly gifted to my sister), Joanna's Champagne Road Wash, Elizabeth G's Dreamsicle lipbalm, and also her cute-as-pie purse, seen here exhausted after daily use in Vancouver:I hope you ladies had fun with me, vicariously!

After our return home, one of our first meals was this lovely plateful - clockwise from top: chanterelle mushrooms from our yard, sauteed in butter; the last of our previous year's green beans cooked with our homemade sun-dried tomato paste; a slice of terrific pizza from Pizza X; our own tomatoes topped with dh's homemade tzatziki made with our own cucumbers.
After we got home, we had to go pick up the materials for ds#1's biology lab course from Meg, so she and I exchanged our pay-it-forward swap gifts. You will not believe the works of art she made! Meg does the most gorgeous leather crafts, and she made me a set of stunning coasters:Each coaster has a different flower, and she even wrote what each flower is on the back of the coaster:Take a look at the wonderful detailing:Many, many thanks, Meg!

I've enjoyed the swap/gifting thing so much I'm thinking I'll have to do it again. Maybe I can organize something like the Christmas gift exchange that kids often do in their classes. Those who are interested can sign up, and I can pair names up by pulling 2 out of a hat at a time...that way, we'd only each have one swap partner and don't have to scramble to make 12 gifts or something. Any thoughts on that, anyone?

I'm looking forward to a moderately quiet week this week. What about you? Any fun plans?

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." ~ Douglas Adams