Give and Give and Give

In the past couple of days I've picked almost 5 gallons of tomatoes from our plants. It had apparently been too long since the last time I picked some because there were a bunch of tomatoes that had split and fallen off the vines to become one with the ground. It's impressive to me how much food you can get from just a single plant!

I'm making more sauce to can. And this time I'm going to make some Tikka Masala that doesnt' have dairy or garlic so my honeypot can eat some too.

I really like that photo up there. It looks so country with the wood floor and bowl.

Busy Day

Today was an active day. Here's what I did.
-had breakfast with my honey
-clear out the walkway of overgrown plants
-swept the sidewalk on both sides of our house
-replaced my office desk with a table and got everything set up again
-made chocolate chip cookies
-cooked dinner
I also canned some red sauce last night, and canned some tikka masala as well.

My honey put our new toilet in the upstairs bathroom, played his guitar, and other things too.

Careful Consideration of Creative Crafts (and Aliteration)

On Saturday I met up with a friend and had a canning party. We bought some basil, onions and tomatoes at the nearby farmer's market and canned a red sauce and an Indian saucy thing. The red sauce was really more of an orange with the heirloom tomatoes we used. Too bad we were only a couple months late in buying the tomatoes. Next year I might try and can when the tomatoes are plentiful (and cheap), instead of waiting until possibly the last weekend they're available.

The other highlight was having breakfast with my long lost friend who moved to Dublin for a girl. Considering how indecisive he can be, it's a wonder he made it over there. I'm really glad he did because she's really special (and I think it was good for him to go.)

Another highlight was my friend's 31st birthday party on Sunday night. It was quite an event. Besides the homemade enchiladas (complete with homemade mole saucy, that was out of this world) it was an experience to be around so many toddlers. It was chaotic. I was whelmed. I enjoyed watching them be themselves and explore, but wow, those kids sure do have a lot of energy. The parents looked a little .. run down. Especially the ones with the 7 week old. I suppose that's to be expected.

The picture above is the canned goods and the finished hats. The green hat was made by my honeypot and includes some daring dinosaur fins that stand straight up like a Mohawk when worn. The other hat is one that I made in about a day and a half. It helped that I was stuck in an hour and a half of traffic just to get to work. I made about half of the hat then. No, I wasn't driving, I was carpooling.

Another exciting thing in my life is riding my bike to work. I have this super fun bouncy fold up commuter bike that I rode the end of last week to work. It's pretty fun. It has shocks on the seat post.

And the last thing worth mentioning is that I finally finished my wedding album. My work generously bought me this silver engraved wedding album right after I got married and it's been sitting on my desk these many months beckoning me to fill it with the best pictures of our wedding. I finally went through all my hundreds of pictures from friends and hand picked the best ones. I'm impressed with the result and I'm excited to have it (Thanks Stephanie!). There really is something to the tactile nature of physical pictures as opposed to digital ones.

That's one of the reasons I'll be watching closely the success or failure of the Kindle. Amazon's replacement for the book. I can't imagine every giving up the ability to curl the edges of my paperbacks while reading. (I'm currently reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire.)

Early Unix Morning, Yoga, Cool Shoes

Well, this morning I got up at 5:30 to again work with that guy mentioned yesterday from VT. There was a lot of progress on the project and I'm really glad I hired him. (And I'm saying that after two days of getting up obnoxiously early.) I have to admit that I like changing things about my life once in a while. Like getting up early, or going to a new coffee shop. Shaking it up really has positive value for me.
This contractor had to take a couple hour break around 9 our time, so I went to yoga. It was perfect. Just enough time to get there and be back. I've been stretching a lot more lately and it feels really good. I'm amazed at how quickly I lose range and my body is negatively affected by lack of exercise and stretching. It really affects my moods, digestion, and choice of foods too. I'm also really amazed at how many times I had to rewrite the word exercise above before I spelled it right. And yes, I did finally look it up. (Because yahoo mail spell check wasn't even getting close, and neither was I).
After yoga and several more hours of work I went and ran some errands. I went to that great hardware store in Elmwood - to try and find a lid for this pyrex glass storage bowl. Recently (in the past several months) I've gotten on a kick to try and minimize our food storage in plastic because we eat so many things that are stored in plastic. It seems like it should be bad for us. They didn't have a lid, but I did see these cute canning jars, and we have soooo much food that we can't possibly eat from getting a weekly CSA box that I was inspired. There's so many turnips and squash that just accumulates. I finally canceled it because I like to actually choose some of the food I eat, as opposed to only eating what's in the box just so we have a chance at finishing it off. It doesn't end until mid Feb. I decided that I would make something out of all that food and can it.

While walking back to my car I saw these really cute mary jane shoes in the window and went in and tried 'em on. They fit great, and they're really cool. I don't buy shoes that often, so it's pretty cool that this worked out so easy.
Then I drove to home depot and got two paint chips matched and bought two gallons of paint. One is for our upstairs bathroom where one whole wall wasn't painted (because there used to be a claw foot tub there - this is before Punkinpie moved it so we could actually have a shower) And the other is for part of the living room wall that needs to be touched up from when Punkinpie put foam insulation in around the bay windows (over a year ago now). For some reason, in the past several weeks I've been noticing these places on the walls that need to be touched up more. I should mention that I had gotten a true paint chip several days ago and it was rejected for color matching. They told me to match it that it should be a 1" square chunk with drywall (or in our house - lat and plaster) behind it. So, I had cut out these pretty large "chunks" from these two walls. It was pretty fun, because even though it was for a purpose, it felt like it was pretty pointless destruction.
After getting paint from this employee at home depot who really seemed to be having fun, I came home and made a huge amount of soup/stew using up some of the too much food that we have. While it simmered I did my laundry and went around and spakled the holes I created and some other big holes I found. After the stew was done I canned it and now have lunch for 10 days. I put tons of turnips and other random stuff in there, and added lots of spice and lemon juice. I really thought that it would be so gross that I would have to throw it away, but it was pretty darn good. I'm glad that I'll have yummie lunches to bring to work that require no preparation at all. Just some bread, possibly some cheese and a microwave, which they're sure to have. Don't all offices have a microwave?
I put my laundry away and came in here to check my email after thinking about napping. And after seeing Yar's day email, I decided to write my own. I'm really tired. I've been super productive today, and I've been awake for 13 hours already. I think it would be wise to take a nap now because tonight is a date night for Punkinpie and I. It would be pretty lame to fall asleep. And I feel like I just might do that.

Cool Links for my Day:
Subversive Knitting
Discover New Music