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!

Paris Hilton

Today's jammie cam features me back at Chez Wilde, eating my beloved yogurt, checking email, doing a little yoga, and preparing for a day of making apricot jam. Yep, more canning, just in case the apocalypse comes sooner rather than later.

Checking my email includes quickly scanning my spam folder, and I see that Paris has been very busy this week. Below is the list of activities attributed to Ms Hilton:

Engaging in oral sex with the New England Patriots (I assume it's the football team, although I suspect poor Paul Revere would rather it were the original patriots);

Losing her vagina because of Dr Phil (I have no idea how that could happen; I expect some pathology journal will be having a huge write-up on this, because it must be a true rarity in the annals of medicine. I'm also curious as to how a second-rate psychologist could make it happen; I would think that major surgery would be involved);

Coming close to bankruptcy (the cost of vagina-removing surgery, perhaps? She should have asked the Patriots to help out with some cash);

Being asked to operate the LHC (the big ol' particle accelerator that potentially could produce micro black holes...who better to be involved, eh?);

I'll skip the one about her swallowing - it's probably related to the New England Patriots social event;

Oh, apparently the Patriots were not the only lovers she took this week, as she hooked up with some space aliens and is apparently having their love child;

And finally, she got caught not wearing any knickers (consider her sexual activities for the week, I'd be more surprised to find out she had any on).

So for those of you who think I'm having too much fun, my time since being off the job hasn't remotely compared to this, even whilst hanging out in the Bat Cave (I was watching Star Trek, after all). In fact, I've not gotten a single invite to the Large Hadron Collider events, something I'm mightily peeved about. Maybe I need to move up to a better class of Mad Scientist; although I think Egon has the potential to create a huge rift in the fabric of space and time, I'm not getting any younger. I want to achieve my goal of being a B-movie lab assistant - complete with angora sweater - before I end up needing a walker. I don't want my screams of terror to be mistaken for an attack of gout.

Below: Dolores Fuller from "Bride of the Monster" - I think I could get away with a similar look, don't you?

Unemployed Slacker

Firstly, apologies to my readers for being so neglectful of their needs. I have indeed been rather busy this week. I'm still spending a fair amount of time at the Bat Cave - they liked my strawberry nut bread enough to let me continue stealing high-speed internet access from their super important processes. And I have indeed been doing that. There are still a few Star Trek episodes I want to see ;-)

Also on Tuesday I spent the day canning - pickled beets and pickled red cabbage. These are things, I realize, that are likely to only appeal to southerners, so it's okay with the author if you read this while making faces and going, "Eeeeew! Gross!" That will just leave more for the rest of us.


I also had writing group last night - the toughest editor in the group says my whaling novel is coming along swimmingly. Ha! Such a witty group. Later in the evening I was discussing the writing group with my Mad Scientist friend and explaining the other pieces reviewed. I said one of them was a memoir (about the writer's experiences as an alien abductee aboard a Vulcan space ship that got sucked into some time distortion and ended up in the mid-20th century), and explained the difference between a memoir and an autobiography. My friend suggested that I should write a memoir about my sister - something that, I must admit, had never occurred to me before.

However, it would be a fitting thing; after all, my love of letters, literature and writing have very much to do with her introducing me to books that held my interest and left me wanting more. The difficulty, of course, is writing about something so close to the heart - finding words to describe the decades of non-verbal communication that passed between us, for example, or even the simple task of trying to fully grasp the imprint one's sibling has left on one's life. A daunting task, a challenge to be sure, but I think I will take this one up.

Now, what would make such an endeavor perfect is if I can set it on an island populated by dinosaurs from a prehistoric theme park gone wrong....

Jam Cam

First of all, many apologies for being such an irregular correspondent. It's not as if I'm lacking material from which to draw inspiration; it is mostly a matter of time constraints. Having enough time to think through what I would say; the post about why I would never succeed in a restaurant job is an example of what happens when I don't spend enough time on my writing. There's a better post in there somewhere, but it will be awhile before I can sit down and rewrite it. And I don't want a blog that is going to be full of crappy, half-written posts. Honestly - my mother raised me better than that. But let's move on to today's topic.

I have been referring to the camera on my new little Mac Book as the "jammy cam" at work, taunting my coworkers with the fact that, once I'm laid off, I'll be posting photos of me in my jammies drinking tea and typing blog posts while they're slaving at work. (Hey, if one is going to be unemployed for awhile, one might as well get some enjoyment out of it; not getting up at 5:30 AM is going to be a big chunk of that enjoyment.) Today, though, it was more jam than jammies that were being photographed.

I took this week off from work; we get two days off for the holiday, and long before layoffs came I had decided to take the entire week off. After news of the serious layoffs headed our way was announced, I decided to enjoy the three extra days off and be rested for the bad news. So I've sort of used this week as a trial for being unemployed. The weekend was a bit of a bust, as it reached 303.15 degrees Kelvin in my apartment (and I assure you, the 86 degrees F really felt more like 303.15). But Monday I had an appointment, purchased some badly needed knitting tools, purchased something for my mother and knitting swap pal at the Daiso $1.50 store, did some dishes and some laundry. Yesterday I came over to a friend's house around noon - we rendezvoused at the Goodwill near her home, where I purchased some yarn and came up with an excellent cheap craft idea (notice I didn't say it was tasteful or attractive), and then we returned to her home to make strawberry jam from berries her bf had raised in their backyard. This morning we had toast with our lovely, perfectly jellied strawberry jam, bacon, potatoes, and fresh eggs from her chickens. Last night we lounged in their hot tub and watched meteors and the space station cross the night skies.

Not working sucks ;-)

Anyway, here are some lovely photos of our jam:




And here's a gratuitous chicken photo: