Beeting and Plumming

My friend, her cat Drusilla, and yours truly enjoying morning coffee & email

Yes, more canning work accomplished this week. Two bloody days of scrubbing, boiling and peeling beets for canning. My friend wanted to do 25 pounds worth - we both agreed, never again. Our maximum is 15 pounds, folks. At least we've established a limit, which is good, and we've enough beets canned to keep the rebel alliance alive through the winter.

The plum jam - three batches, but I must say, it's really beautiful, lovely, gorgeous jam. Some lucky few might get a taste of it. The rest of you will be living lives of deprivation, not knowing what you're missing except for my effusive descriptions of jam and toast.

Right now I'm trying to convince my friend that I've earned breakfast; after all, I baked a batch of chocolate chips early today (around 7:30 AM), and feel that I've earned a fried egg and some toast with just a smidgen of homemade plum jam.

I must apologize for being gone so long; two days last week were spent with the mater, trying to find a refrigerator that would make her as happy as the one she got in 1964 - if you think tilting at windmills is a waste of time, I assure you, the hunt for the refrigerator like the one the mater had in 1964 is equally as futile and uses much more gasoline.

Sunday was spent helping Egon, my mad scientist friend, construct a small space for his next series of experiments. The actual lab work probably won't commence until sweater season starts. After all, one must wear the proper clothing for the task at hand. I did explain to him Washington Administrative Code for the use of PPE the other day; he stayed awake through the entire lecture, telling me that he truly is a nerd. However, since I have so much to say about PPE, SOPs, NIST-traceable weights and calibration records, it's just as well I'm spending time with someone who finds that information useful. Monday was spent delivering beets. 25 pounds of beets. I think it will be a couple of days before I want to have anything to do with beets again.

I've also been reading up quite a bit for my novels. Titles include: The Steam Engine, It's History & Mechanism, Crimes & Punishments, Reminiscences of My Military Life, and The Girls Own Book. One must be thoroughly grounded in the political, economic, technological and social activities of the era one writes about, otherwise one will sound like a complete wantwit. I'm enjoying my forays into previous centuries, and it's entirely possible that I won't even bother returning to the present.

I have to admit that I was excited last week when I saw the headlines, "Palin is McCain's Choice for VP" until I realized it was not Michael Palin. For some few brief seconds I was looking forward to a Vice President who would jump up and down and yell, "Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I'm being repressed!" No such luck, sad to say.

That's okay - Ralph Wiggum may yet end up being my choice for president in the end. After all, he's been a good boy!